Braided Lives (64 page)

“Peter has that Grosse Pointe mentality, all right. Try to get him to do anything in Detroit. If he knew we were going to Belle Isle, he’d lecture me for an hour on how dangerous it is.” A red light halts us in the world that feels as if it is made of melting plastic. “Marrying me was his big act of rebellion.”

“Why do you think marrying a man is any better than living with him?”

“He isn’t committed.” The light changes and she drags a Corvette. “He doesn’t have to work things out. You think Peter would move to New York if we weren’t married?”

“He was thinking about it a year ago.”

“I’m talking about doing it. I’m his wife. That means I come before daddy and mommy and all the twirps he hung around the fucking country club with…. Oh, I’m taking tennis lessons. I dropped the French, since we’re not going.”

“Are you terribly disappointed? I’d consider a murder or two for a trip to France.”

“I have to think of the bigger picture, getting him away from the poisonous influence of his parents. Marriage means taking your decisions seriously, Stu, not just bolting off the way we used to.”

The sun steel-clangs on streets that smell of tar as she whips the car through traffic. Behind the dark glasses her eyes are squinted against the glare. I experience a moment of pure loss thinking of Kemp. It was impossible because of his violence, his racism; it was impossible and yet I miss him. Physically, irrationally, I miss. It’s driving in the car that brought him back to me.

“The scary thing about affairs,” she is saying, “is you put everything, all of yourself, into every one and lose.”

“Doesn’t have to be that way. I want more friendship and less clawing and gouging.”

“But if you love, I mean. You’re burned afterward. So you do it again. A little less of you is left. Then a lot less. Marriage is different.”

“Yeah, divorce is worse than breaking up, I hear. I don’t see a neat progression and I don’t think there’s less of me. I open up differently with different people. Different selves emerge.”

Belle Isle is very flat out in the middle of the vast Detroit River, with episodes of little bridges, lagoons, flat open playing fields, groves, what I think of as casino architecture. It’s crowded today but there’s room for more. The yacht and powerboat clubs face Detroit, but on the side toward Windsor, Canada, people are sitting in chairs they’ve brought, sunning, listening to radios, drinking beer, fishing. It’s always cooler here. We park downriver, under the shade of a big weeping willow. She shades her eyes. “I’m always the same self. Me. The dumb scared child who shits in her pants. That’s what I’ve learned in therapy, Stu. You need a good therapist.”

I refuse to rise to the bait of our fortieth argument on therapy. “Sometimes I love Detroit.” I gesture toward downtown. “How it steams and throbs on a June day like this, an enormous wounded heart.”

She stares at the river flowing away from us downstream. “Do you remember how when we were freshmen we’d talk about when you ought to sleep with men and what was promiscuity and we were very grave and anxious?”

“We tried to make a new morality that works for us.”

“So I noticed how at first I thought three affairs meant you were promiscuous. Then I had three, so I thought having sex with somebody you don’t love is promiscuous. Then I had an affair with Charlie. Then I thought being involved with two men at once or taking somebody else’s man—so I broke every rule I made. It’s like there are no rules, really, and you can just drown in it.”

“But there aren’t rules. You do make up your own or just accept what somebody else made up for their reasons.” I feel shed like an old sweater. I get out of the car and walk toward the water. She follows me. I say, “I feel as if you’re more married than you are Donna. Marriage wraps you up like cellophane.”

“But it’s the thing I’m doing. The most important thing in my life. Everything else has to be secondary. Everybody sees less of her girlfriends after she’s married. Grow up!”

“Damn you, Donna, fight it! You need me in your corner.”

“He’s in my corner. You’ve been afraid to fall really in love after Mike. You’ll see.” She smiles, her gaze turned away. “You’re jealous.”

“Yes, I know. Donna thinks Carl and I are the Jukes and Kallikacks of our generation.” Julie pats her belly. She is pregnant again. “It’s far more practical this way. Get it all over with. I mean, I can’t do a bloody other thing now anyhow, so I might as well make babies while I’m raising babies, don’t you think?”

“Are you happy with Carl?” Has he stopped saying women are made for love?

“Of course! I have what I wanted—a husband, a house, my own family.” But the rest of the two hours she complains. He isn’t ambitious enough, he doesn’t listen to her father’s advice, he spends too much time in front of the TV and too much money playing golf. He never cleans the bathtub after himself. He doesn’t pick up his socks. He won’t brush his teeth before they make love.

But Julie adores her children unstintingly. Carl, Jr., is sweet and chubby, hauling about an immense once-white rabbit. The baby is featureless to me but beautiful to Julie. Julie as mother is Julie without sarcasm, rid of the necessity to make the first put-down. I feel she has developed a contempt for Carl already, based on conviction that anyone she can have isn’t worth having. “The major advantage to marriage as far as I can see,” she says when I repeat my conversation with Donna, “is, one, you get to make babies and they’re dumplings and they have to love you. And two, when you’re dating a man and you start having sex, you always have to. But once they’re married, they stop making a fuss. Five minutes once a week and you’re let off bothering about it the rest of the time.”

Like the Victorian house in Cold Springs, Julie’s split-level has two living rooms, a formal parlor done in white and blue for company (not including me) and a family room where they actually spend time. About Donna, Julie declaims, “She can’t go on fiddling. Either she has to produce an heir, or go back to school, or go to work. No other choices. She’s a fool if she doesn’t pick babies.” Then she tries to condole with me on not having nailed down Donaldson. “He would have been a real catch. Then you could have stayed in Ann Arbor.”

I almost shudder.

The night is hot and thirsty. The elms stoop under the burden of dusty slack leaves. Around the streetlights flying beetles and moths form speckled halos. Detroit stirs and seethes around this quiet street. It is crackling and sputtering, slamming cars together like crushed tin cans, rushing ambulances through the night, shooting off Saturday night specials and cherry bombs, racing its engine, bursting into rhythm and blues or country music from rival car radios as they squeal down the street in a movie chase and then halt with a screech at the stoplight, their radios blaring even louder. Everywhere people are fucking and fighting and blowing off the anger of the grim and grimy workday. The whole city is on amphetamines. On uppers and booze. It sings funky and grinds its teeth, cool and hot at once and hungry for something to kill the pain.

“New York,” my father mutters with deep suspicion, rocking on the porch. “I was there once. They don’t have one hotel, they have two miles of hotels. They don’t have one pawnshop, they have two miles of pawnshops. Streetcars up in the air too noisy to hear yourself. It’s a dirty place. No trees. No light.”

Every day Mother marks the newspapers, circling with red crayon jobs for secretaries and receptionists. “We’re looking at houses,” she says. “We’ll get a bigger house. One with plenty of room for the boys when they come home and you can have a room all to yourself. You could save a lot of money with a good secretarial job and living at home. Get yourself some clothes and have your hair done and see Donna whenever.”

She works hard, my mother in her little house. The soot floats down day and night. Sheets on the line yellow in the acid rain from the factories. Every two days the sills must be washed. My father tracks in grease from work and his clothes have to be prescrubbed at the washboard before they go into the washing machine with its wringer where she catches a finger at least once a year.

She sits nearsightedly squinting at the old sewing machine, shortening a coat she bought too large at a rummage sale. She is always making over, trying to create something nice and pretty or at least serviceable out of what somebody with more money has discarded or sold off cheap. Things break and she fixes them, mends the old chair, glues the cracked plate, darns the worn sock. All day she scrubs and cleans and mutters. The bills come in and she mutters. She wants it nice, the house, her life. She irons even the sheets and towels. She wants to be a baleboste and she is still showing her mother she can do it better. She was angry at her mother; she stayed angry. Not enough in a family of twelve for any particular girl-child.

He works hard, my father, long hours. His hands are relief maps of burns and scars. His back is stooped from peering forward into engines. He has a permanent hacking cough from smoking and from breathing exhaust fumes. His light grey eyes are squinted as if against a glare; they have the air of having wanted to look into distances rarely offered them. At fourteen he worked evenings and weekends and he has worked ever since.

With my books and my papers and my ever more peculiar interests and passions and ambitions, my friends they mistrust, I come into this house like a hot wind, casting dust in their eyes and spoiling their food. I want to make them happy. I pursue them around the house trying to share my ideas, to please, and I terrify. I am nothing they know what to do with. They tell me about the daughters of their friends, the girls of the neighborhood. Audrey had twins, both boys. Joyce is engaged to a pipefitter. Neighborhood news. Freddie is in prison at Jackson not for the still but for a robbery Mother thinks he didn’t commit. Sharkie is in the army in Germany. Callie is working at Awrey’s Bakery, along with Le Roy next door, who told my mother.

“Where’s Francis?” I ask.

“He shipped out on an ore boat,” Dad says. “Got his union card. Working the Great Lakes up to Duluth.”

“At least he’s working regular,” Mother says. “It takes a load off my mind, chickie, to know where he is so I don’t lie awake all night stewing and fretting about him, like I did when he was you-know-where down in Mexico.”

I want to say,
Look, I love you,
but it comes to me that is the last thing I can say directly. It is not said in this house. The flimsy walls would crack with shame if I spoke it. We have channels between us for insult, channels for negotiation and innuendo, for push and pull, even for comfort after injury, but none for affection. I am a daughter who does not fit into the narrow slot marked Daughter and they cannot rejoice in me.

Mother calls to me. She squats in front of the tall secretary dragging out the old album. She folds back the tablecloth Buhbe crocheted and plops it down on the plastic pad underneath. “You’ll want some of the family.”

I find she is right. Leaning on a plump elbow she turns the cluttered pages, touching her forefinger to her tongue and tapping fading snapshots of her family, frowning with a sucked-in muttering, nodding with a bittersweet pucker. Boys in knickers, girls with huge bows perched on their curls pose in ranks on the steps of dreary frame houses old even then. Mother’s face beautiful and heart-shaped turns up with a shy and pained smile as she sits on the grimy stoop of a tenement, one tentative hand still protecting a book and her long muslin dress brushing her high shoes. She was so beautiful, my young mother, that my heart throbs like a rotten tooth.

“There’s your grandfather with some of his friends, just before they killed him.” In a group of pickets, Grandfather puts his arm around a fat man with his arm in a sling. “Wasn’t he a man and a half? Look how he stood, like a king.”

With two young women, arms around each other’s waists, Mother in white shirtwaist and stem-narrow black skirt stands outside Wana-maker’s where she worked. Mother is on the left. With a corsage on her starched bosom and her leg nicely turned out, she waits hopefully in a model’s pose for the attention that will transfigure her world of trouble, poverty and sorrow.

“That’s
him,
” she whispers loudly. “Didn’t think I had any left. I thought your father ripped them all up.” A stocky man grins on a seashore in a striped thirties bathing suit. Dad passes us with a beer in his hand and says nothing.

“Who’s that with me?” Grinning through a missing front tooth I hold my skirt out daintily and embrace a spindly flaxen tot who stares not at the camera but at my cat washing himself. One thin arm extends futilely toward his furriness.

“Donna. You were four. Oh, you were such a sweet-tempered baby, Jill!” Her eyes rake my face accusingly. That baby, where?

Father’s face at his high-school graduation peers bright-eyed as a squirrel from lowered face, chin warring with stiff collar. Photographs grey as the gnawing rat of time. Albums should come engraved with grim Latin mottoes. Buhbe huddles spent and confused in the hot July sun on Belle Isle. Did she smell death in the dusty picnic air? What determined that she spoke Yiddish to me and I answered her in English? I will learn Yiddish and hear her voice again, reborn.

Mike and I drink soda on the steps. “Let me have that one.”

“Holding on to the past! That nothing—a hero made of straw! A schtroyene held!” She slams the album shut. “Enough! You’re never satisfied.” She glares at the photos she gave me. “Give you an inch and you take a mile.”