Braided Lives (8 page)

A daughter too. I do not contradict her, but Leo marries every two years. As Mother screamed at Francis last time he was home, he’s stuck on “hanging your hat up with nothing but tramps and tarts.”

I say only, “I’m going upstairs to study.”

“Don’t you want lunch?” The knife goes snick, snick.

“Ate a sandwich at school.”

“Have another cup of tea while I put the chicken on.”

“No thanks.” The paint fumes are still strong, saturating even the attic stairs. I climb slowly, savoring the ascent above the house into my privacy. My eyes rise level with the floor and through the open door I see it, a broad yellow wall. My glider has been pushed to one side, my books piled haphazardly, my papers (rifled? read?) in a heap, my room turned inside out and painted a shrieking yellow. I leap to the doorway, sick but unbelieving. No. We are so locked in combat anything can serve as assault one on the other, presents, meals, even paint. Then I fling my schoolbooks across the room and plummet down the steps.

She swirls from the oven to face me, her face tight with an imitation smile. “Doesn’t it look cheerful? I worked all morning to surprise you.”

“Like hell. How dare you take over the only thing I have?”

“Don’t scream at me. Any normal person would thank me. Hiding up there day and night.”

“Damn you! You’ll do anything to hurt me. You try to eat me alive!”

“Don’t talk to me that way, you little worm! There’ll be no more rooting in dirty books like a pig in its sty!”

“You have no right! Surprise—knife in the back.”

“Yowl! Yowl like a cat. You walk around with your head up your ass and your ears full of shit, you complete klutz, and then you wonder why you don’t know anything!”

“I’ll never forgive you for this! Never!”

I duck but not quick enough. The heel of her hand strikes me on the mouth, jolting my head back. “Forgive me? You poor blind ugly slut! You dirty little gutter worm living on your own shit!”

Crying already, stupid with rage and self-pity, I turn, jamming my hands over my ears and rush out. Running till my side jabs, then walking block after block, teeth chattering, sucking my swollen lip and clenching my fists, finally I wear my anger numb. Then indifferent and cold to the pit of my brain, cold through all my knotted muscles, I turn and walk home. I will get away. I will not give in to them. I will get away.

CHAPTER FOUR

W
HEREIN
W
E
L
EARN
T
HAT
S
NOW
L
EOPARDS
B
ARE
M
ANY
T
ALES

W
ITH THE KEY I just signed for at the desk in the lobby clotted with families and luggage among the rubber plants, for the first time I enter the small double room. Light from the courtyard pours between draperies of tomato burlap, roughening the texture of the white walls and casting shadows from the plain blond furniture and the heap of boxes and suitcases.

Mother bustles past to drop her load. “Well! So tiny. Looks like a cell, chickie. You’d think for what they charge …”

I start, a shock of instant contact meeting my cousin’s stare. For another moment she stands rigid in the corner where she must have backed at our noisy approach, small and flaxen with a hard pallor (why do I remember in the zoo one spring afternoon with Howie meeting through the intervening bars a snow leopard pacing alone round and round?), before her high voice bursts from her frantic as a trapped bird in inane family greetings.

Dad rumples his hair in disappointment. “Hubie and Louella left? Kind of thought we might see them. Have supper. I said we should get an early start.”

“That’s your quilt on the bottom bunk?” Mother beams at Donna but the poppies of her hat jiggle ominously. “Of course you’ll want to change around each month, to be fair.”

Mother wants to unpack me, but parting makes Dad fidget. While they argue, Donna bats between them, joking nervously, and when we are left alone laughs even more frantically, trying so desperately to present a scatterbrained simple blithe facade that I am puzzled. She wears a little gold cross that Sunday on her pale blue sweater, but the next morning it is gone. The only time I find it thereafter is when I am rummaging in her top drawer for a clean pair of socks to borrow.

That first week we tiptoe around each other cautious as dynamiters. Her facade breaks off one brittle shard at a time. Two forces free Donna. One is me. I am a force. A power of joy moves through me those early weeks in the realm of my own sweet volition. I have grown a foot overnight. I sit up till two studying. When I finish my classwork, I read hers just to share, to gobble everything. I run to lectures, my face burning with the passion to listen, to consume, to take every course in the fat catalog simultaneously forever. I will learn French and Zoology, Chinese Thought and Physical Anthropology, The Hundred Years War and the World of Cervantes. Intimate rain caresses me. No one scolds me into galoshes. I run bareheaded through streets pelted with bright minnow leaves swimming in the gutters. I stride past the dormitories, lamps blazing from each room as the huge buildings steam against the wind-buffeted lowering sky like ships of light, and no authority minds what I do as long as I am back by curfew. The bars are gone. I have leapt from my cage and no one shall entice me into a narrow room again. My energy makes Donna smile.

The second force? Her own desperation. I feel it as an electric crackling that builds till it burns across the gap like a voltage experiment in physics, when she cries at me, “Oh, you don’t know! You don’t know me. If you did, you’d walk out of this room.”

That is a sharp hook. I narrow my eyes at her astride her desk chair like Marlene Dietrich in
The Blue Angel,
with her corduroy skirt rucked up to show her beautiful legs—Donna’s, not Marlene’s—and I know I am being lured to ask questions. How delightful, that someone should want me to pay attention. By the fourth week I do not think of her as my cousin any longer; I have begun to think of her as my conspirator. We are poor, we are on scholarships, we are ill-dressed, we take the hard courses, we come from the wrong cities and addresses, we will not be rushed by sororities. On the rest of the corridor respectability is counted in the number of cashmere sweater sets and boyfriends with Greek addresses a virtuous girl keeps under or near but not on her bed. You go nine tenths of the way and get pinned. Donna always manages to have dates on the weekends but whatever she is looking for, the Kens and Bobs who have asked her out so far are not it. How am I suddenly aware of caste lines on our corridor? Donna is educating me in her awarenesses, as I in mine. She describes herself as a socialist, since last week.

Our talk is full of “musts” and “must nots,” as in, “We must learn to act authentically with the opposite sex” (me), to Donna announcing right now, “We must get ourselves decent bras.”

A decent bra in 1953 is nearer to an armor breastplate than to a silky froth of lingerie. It holds the breasts apart, forward and out as if setting up a couple of moon shots. We do not have such objects but Donna has it in mind that we need them. Buying them is beyond our means. I regularly steal food for us to supplement dormitory rations, but I can’t see how to swipe bras which are kept under the counter downtown and doled out one by one to be tried. I have checked the situation, and in the process, with a resurgence of my old gang skill, swiped two sweaters, a black wool for me with a turtleneck and long sleeves and a navy blue for Donna. I did not think of them as being for either of us in particular, since we both wear the same sizes in everything but bras and shoes, but Donna insisted ownership be established. I will work on her, I think. I lean toward the communal. I would like everything in the room to be both of ours.

Donna wears her new navy turtleneck, eyeing her neat pale self in the mirror as she flattens the sleek bowl of her moon-colored hair. “Devastating. If only it was cashmere.”

I learn. Next time I will steal the right kind. I want to please her. Pleasure makes her avid and fierce. Now she is peering with a frown as she repeats, “We must have decent bras.”

I perch on the ledge by the casement windows open to the gentle rain, feeling a sensual melancholy like a drug cooling my veins. “Mmm,” I say, “I can’t make those stores for a bra, ma Donna.”

She looks at her watch, graduation present from a former boyfriend. I think she graduated from him too. “Almost midnight. We’ll hit the laundry rooms.”

“I don’t know.” I turn from the rain to face her. “Hitting a store is one thing.”

“From those rich bitches? I’d love to hit them for real.”

It’s expulsion if we’re caught, but that’s beside the point. I appreciate her class hatred that sharpens mine, but I wish she didn’t covet so fiercely what the others have. “‘Things are in the saddle and ride man,’” I quote, but Donna says, “Buggery! You wouldn’t walk all hunched over if you had a decent bra.”

I set the ground rules: we can only rob girls whose wash reveals their class to be very affluent and only if they have on the line more of what we take. We can only use other houses than our own. (Four houses connect through their basements to each other. The outer doors are all booby-trapped with alarms after ten thirty.) That last rule is for fear somebody may recognize her stuff in our subsequent washes. Down into the bowels of the hill we glide in our bathrobes carrying laundry bags and books, as if to wash and study. Donna takes on a bright tight look, her eyes squinted behind her blue-rimmed glasses, her lips pulled back to show her small good teeth. Where did she get good teeth in our family? When I opened my mouth at the physical examination for freshmen, the dentist yelped with glee and three times every week I have dental appointments for students to practice on my poor child’s rotten and broken molars.

“Want to see
The Wild One
tomorrow night?”

She shakes her head no. “Going out with Bob.”

“What for?” We check out a laundry meeting all our specs, except for size: 38A. Too bad. “You don’t even like him.”

“What’s that got to do with it? He’s better than nothing.”

“I saw you necking with him outside,” I say tentatively.

“So? I’m not fucking him, if that’s what you think.”

That she might hadn’t occurred to me. “Why shouldn’t you, if you want to?” I brazen it out, although the idea of her touching anybody she doesn’t even like is ugly to me.

“You mean that?” She inspects another row of washing. “Name tags sewn in. I can get them out with a razor. This is your size. I thought you’d be involved with some guy yourself by now.”

“Me? I wouldn’t know how to go about it.” I angle between her and the door, keeping watch.

“You aren’t a virgin. You! You aren’t!”

I shrug. “Now, if you could lose your cherry by thinking about it or reading about it or even writing about it…”

“I never expected it.” She is disappointed in me. “Of course I’m a virgin.”

She is lying. I am embarrassed. I feel as if I have failed her by lacking experience and failed her if she must lie to me. I say nothing but lead on to the next laundry room.

Football Saturday in late October, the dormitories, the hills of town are emptied. From the stadium two miles away the rhythmic shouts rise, a great roar going up through the brilliant air and jangling the nerves, suggesting to me who has already sampled the hard cider I carry on my hip a human sacrifice out of
The Golden Bough.
I also carry my notebook, while Donna totes rye bread, cheese and pears. We head into the Arboretum. Donna was here last night making out with Vincent, her newest. Across a ravine, brick apartments for married students show between salmon-leaved oaks. We sold our football tickets to buy records. I have just discovered Bartok and what one of us bites into, the other chews and swallows.

“In that black turtleneck and a good bra, you look sexy today,” she tells me.

I shrug. Making me over. Broad leaves webbed brown on gold, scarlet slivers drift over the ruts of the dirt road. “I don’t want to get trapped in that kind of female caring. To be blind with self-centered-ness.”

“Listen!” She stops short. In the sun her eyes are alcohol flames. “If you aren’t aware with your body, you might as well die. You are self-conscious, but in a bad shy way.”

“I’m two months old. I was just born and you’re good for me.”

She lets out her high barking laugh. “Me? I’m the original corrupting influence.”

Corrosive maybe. We strike against each other chipping off the useless debris of our childhoods. With her tense never quite completed motions she hurries down this road. She has so little color in her skin and hair she should look wan, but her pallor has an edge. “We define each other.”