Braided Lives (63 page)

“I don’t get involved with students. I don’t approve of the jerks who do. It’s using position.”

“You aren’t my professor. You haven’t been for four years. You aren’t even in my department. You can’t even put a letter of recommendation in my file. American history, they’d say, what’s this?” I am pushing him past any real thought of consequence because what is happening is interesting. I don’t think anybody has ever pushed him quite this way, or maybe Alberta did. “Wasn’t Alberta your student at CCNY, before you got this job? She followed you here.”

“Well, and look what happened!”

“What happened? You almost married her? That was a close call.”

“I almost fucked up my whole career!” he says and jumps up, pacing to the other end of the tiny kitchen.

Oh. Of course. Having a Communist for a girlfriend is bad enough, but marrying one! To be a Left lib without a label, that’s the ticket to survival. Dissent but not subversion, forums but not fights, exactly how far you can go without losing your job. In spite of Mike’s predictions two years ago, Donaldson marches on. There is no use being snotty even as I sit in his kitchen drinking coffee I made in his pot: he is the best of the bunch. At least he stimulates thinking in his students. Because of what he just blurted out, he is glaring at me and it is time for me to go home in the rosy May evening.

Howie hauls Stephanie’s black steamer trunk up from the basement, and out of a whirlwind of skirts and dresses and sweaters, two piles emerge to restore us to hers and mine. “Why are you going home for the summer to Port Huron?” I ask.

She speaks from the depths of the closet, throwing shoes out behind her like dirt from a hole she is digging. “You sound just like Howie! Really!”

“He’s right. You could finish up your degree at summer school.”

“Nonsense. Most of my incompletes are papers I haven’t written, and I can work on them just as well at home, and a lot cheaper. Stu, you just don’t understand. You and Howie don’t have real families.”

“My parents are pretty real. Howie gave a whole year to his.”

“They don’t seem to care what you do, where you go. You’re off to New York, and you don’t even have relatives there.”

“It’s not true they don’t care. They try to control me. I left home so that they couldn’t.”

“If I didn’t come home for the summer, everybody in the neighborhood would ask where I was. My father expects me to work in the store. They pay for my schooling and they expect me to come home when they want me home. They’d never agree to summer school.” She tosses my black turtleneck to me. “I’ll have all summer to work on my father and my mother, separately, to persuade them I can go to New York to work. I do have an aunt there in Astoria….” She pronounces it as if it were Greek—Ahs-tor-ree-yah.

“At some point you’re going to have to go public about Howie—tell your parents.”

“Ummm. It’ll be trouble.” As she packs, the room looks bleak and bare.

“I can see you after the fourth kid finally telling them it wasn’t a virgin birth after all.”

“My father’s not naive. Just possessive.”

“Is it because Howie’s Jewish you’re afraid?”

“He doesn’t look very Jewish. But he’s clearly not Greek…. Is this yours or mine?” She holds up a Liberty print blouse.

“Never saw it before in my life.”

“I swear it isn’t mine…. Stu, what’s the point causing trouble when we aren’t about to marry yet? When we’re finally going to do it, I’ll fight those battles. Suppose I went through all the fighting and suffering and then we didn’t get married? They wouldn’t trust me anymore and I’d be nowhere.”

I pack, dividing my stuff into what will go into temporary storage in Detroit, and what I’m carrying along to New York that will wait in Ann Arbor while I say good-bye to my parents. I will be staying with Alberta at first, on Horatio Street in the Village. Today my father will fetch me and boxes. Wanda will feed Minouska. Then I come back, collect the rest of my stuff and head for New York by train. Alberta will meet me next Friday. To my naive surprise I have learned my parents do not give a damn about my graduating with honors, and would only go to the commencement in the spirit of attending a funeral out of obligation. We will none of us go to commencement.

I have not been able to write Donna. I can’t endure the idea of Peter picking up my letters. I think of her daily as if an unanswered phone were ringing in me. Oddly enough we communicate through Mother. Estelle calls my mother frequently, too frequently for my mother’s pleasure, to complain of how unfriendly and superior Peter’s family acts. Donna calls my mother to complain in general and to pass messages to me. I give my mother messages for Donna. Mother is switchboard central. “I call when
he
isn’t there,” she explains. “It’s easier on Donna.”

I ask hopefully, “You know his schedule?”

“I just concentrate before I dial.” She smiles serenely. “I can tell.”

Mother has arranged a rendezvous for tomorrow noon at the house. I would rather meet Donna downtown or at the Art Institute, but if as it seems I can’t call without tipping off Peter (am I to assume he has forbidden her to see me?), I have to take Mother’s arrangement as a given.

Mother is on Donna’s side now. I can’t believe how Mother approves of my ex-roommate, my cousin, my old conspirator. Does that mean she is accepting me more? I never give up. In a chamber of hope deep in the sinuses Mother opens her arms wide as a queen-sized bed and gives me a salute of victory and cheer, crowning me with roses. Mother bursts into a full operatic aria entitled What a Great Daughter I Have! I sing loud as a chorus of three hundred, Oh, Mother, You Are the One! My One and Only Mother! All images I have of deity are based on early perceptions of thee, source of milk and mothering, source of joy and sorrow, source of sweet caresses, random blows and fearful absences! Never grow any older and adore me again. The universe is just as tricky and just as arbitrary as thou, and almost as beautiful.

Detroit in the summer gives me a hunger for any kind of love, like a drug I could take to quiet this pain which is not entirely memory, both rock and shadow. The smells of asphalt melting under the onslaught of the dirty sun, of burnt rubber, of cooked cars, of brains baking, of angers stewing, of violence on the boil, mix with the fragrance of iris and cut grass from a neighbor’s lawn, of the red roses that bury the fence under their perfumed tresses, the odor of parsley and sage growing just outside the back door in what was once my sandbox. I go about staring hard at the row of stores on the corner with their stamped-tin ceilings, the cinder block bars, the gasworks and the four-whore house on the next block. The neighborhood is turning all Black. My parents talk of leaving. The Djordjevicks sold their house to a colored bus driver and they got ten thousand, my mother says, ten thousand and the roof leaks. I walk fifteen blocks and see only two kids I knew. Kids. One of them is forty pounds heavier than when I last saw her and two babies lighter, one hanging on her skirt and the other in a buggy.

Running up the outside staircase to Callie’s, I bang on her door, but the man who answers is Black and suspicious. The room I glimpse past him has been repainted and paneling added. Something in me repeats like a mourner that this place I have hated is now, because I am leaving it, precious and necessary fuel to me.

I am lying on the old glider upstairs staring at the boxes I have packed and the odds and ends I have still to pack, when I recognize the car engine outside and run the length of the attic to peer out. White Sprite. Donna climbs out, silvery hair, dark glasses. I lunge down the stairs but cannot beat Mother to the door.

“Put on a little weight, urn?” Mother pinches Donna’s upper arm. “Never mind. You look better. You were too scrawny before. Did your mother-in-law buy you that outfit?”

“Marriage is fattening. All that entertaining.” Donna gives a high giggle and Mother chimes in.

“Now that’s too true!”

Donna is tanned: I cannot remember her being tan before. The slacks are linen and fit well; the polo shirt is narrowly striped turquoise on black. She says it is French. Her hair is not curled but cut in layers that make it fuller. No doubt about it, she looks good. Mother nudges us into chairs and bustles into the kitchen for lemonade. I have not had lemonade since I left home; it is the taste of summer in my mother’s house.

“So you’re done with school now, the same as me,” I say, although even as I say it I feel little is the same.

“Finally! But how come you’re not going on to graduate school?”

“I’m going to New York.”

Donna sighs. “It was hard, enduring classes to the end. I felt years older than everybody else. I kept looking at the girls in my classes and thinking, At least I’m done with that. The meat rack.”

“Don’t you think it was a waste of time and money?” Mother says. “After all, you’re married and what good did it do you?”

“I’d never have met Peter if I hadn’t gone to Michigan,” Donna says firmly. “And I was really stupid and naive before.”

“Take off your sunglasses in the house,” Mother urges. “You’ll ruin your eyes leaving them on.”

“Oh, they’re prescription.” Donna tilts them to show us. “Peter wants me to get contact lenses, but the idea of poking things in my eyes terrifies me. I can never put drops in.”

“But if he doesn’t like you in glasses,” Mother says meaningfully. “A thing like that can put a man off.”

Donna grimaces. “I’ll have to try them. I keep postponing the appointment.”

“How are you?” Mother asks, staring at Donna’s midsection. “Are you …?”

“God no!” Donna blurts out. “I’m careful!”

“Good, don’t be in too much of a hurry. Remember after you have babies, you’re never alone, not for years. Not in the morning, not at meals, not at night. You understand me?”

Donna nods. “It would be disastrous now.”

“How are you getting on with his folks?” Mother asks.

I am feeling left out. I will sit silently and pout and then they will see how they have injured me, bonding against me, the two of them, married women conspiring about The Husband together.

“I try to keep my mouth shut. I try and try. But I can’t sit through whole dinner parties without saying something, and then I do it! An idea comes out of me. An opinion. Something that actually demonstrates I’m a person and I read the papers every day and think.” Donna is looking at me now.

I can’t resist answering. “You get in political arguments?”

“You’d be surprised. We can get into one from a comment on how hot it is.”

“The weather,” I say, “is it the Russians’ fault?”

“When summer hit they made some snide remarks about quote the colored unquote opening the hydrants and how it showed they had no sense of civic responsibility, so there was no use pouring money down a rathole. I said I thought a rathole was an accurate description of some of the slums in Detroit and didn’t they like to use their pool when it was hot?”

“The rich are all fascists at heart,” Mother says succinctly, her hands on her knees. “We’re just laying chickens to them.”

She startles me, when out of her comes a pure political remark from her distant past. “Where does Peter stand in all this?”

“Oh, squarely in the middle.” Donna laughs. “I’m always making resolutions that I won’t get into a fight over there…. But you know in a way he likes it. Likes them focusing their discontent on me. I’m a lightning rod. He can mediate. It makes him feel mature and superior.”

“But he’s awfully dependent on what they think,” Mother says.

“I’ve got to get him out of here. He’s been offered that job at Brookhaven, finally, but at less pay. He said if I agree not to go to France, he’ll take it. So I said I’ll give it up to move to New York, but he’s still dillydallying. I’ve been trying out a line on him that his father remained in Detroit all his life because he was scared of New York. I think it’s having some effect.” Donna sighs. “But marriage is great, Stu, absolutely great.”

“Come on, Donna, marriage is only the sum total of separate events. It’s not a thing.”

“You don’t understand,” Mother snaps and Donna nods. Then the teakettle whistles from the kitchen. Mother bounds up to bring back the old tabby teapot on a tray with small cups.

“No tea for me, thank you,” Donna murmurs. “I’m half cooked.”

Mother holds out a cup to her. “Wouldn’t you like me to read your leaves? I haven’t since you were a toddler.”

Donna’s face contracts. She glances around as if beseeching me, the wall. “Oh, don’t bother! Please.”

“No,” I say. “She doesn’t need that.”

“Please. I don’t think I want to know my future.” Donna resorts to a weak giggle.

Mother looks at her with a measuring stare. “Perhaps some other time.” Her voice is sharp with disappointment. “If ignorance is bliss …”

“Donna, could you take me for a drive? I’d love to see Belle Isle again.”

She agrees instantly. I know Mother is miffed at our leaving, but I will deal with that later. Donna drives with style. In fact she handles the car better than Peter ever did. Does that bother him or doesn’t he notice? She has caught his daydream and outperformed, and in what else? For she is quicker, brighter and more desperate. I say, “When I was growing up and used to take the Tireman or the Joy Road buses downtown, I used to sit at the dirty bus window trying to figure out why the objects that gave my eyes the most satisfaction, the most to work on, were grimy tortured rooming houses and slum tenements with broken grandeur, the posturing of dead Victorian egos among the burning stench of people wasting. How can you come from Detroit and not think beauty must contain grit and rake you while it delights? Without an aesthetic that gives a place of honor to the power of incongruity?” I am surely trying to impress her anew.