Braided Lives (9 page)

“Let’s feed each other. I’m tired of walking.” She points out a path. “There’s the plateau, for couples in a hurry. On fine nights you can’t walk without stepping on them.”

We leave the road to climb a hill. Above the shrubs the top is treeless, stiff with brown grass that crackles under us. We pass the jug, as I watch small brown ants busy as rush hour around their anthill. Mother from early childhood trained me to see, to listen, to notice. She considered it immoral not to be sharply observant, and used to make me describe what I’d seen in detail to her. Together in secret we would imitate how acquaintances talked. In recent years appalled at my adolescence, my skimpy but undeniably female growth, she retreated to instructions to chop down curiosity, hang back, blind myself. I took refuge in books and fantasies and now Donna is tearing at those paper walls. As I realize I have truly left home, I can remember how close Mother and I once were.

“You had something to show me,” she murmurs.

I glance at my notebook in the dead grass. “Not important.”

“I could kick you, Stu. You want me to listen and I’m willing. Use the moment.”

I take up the notebook, knowing I delay as much from fear as from modesty. “Called ‘Day is for faces.’” I clear my throat and launch into a fast embarrassed gallop:

Over the abyss of each self

the face stretches its drumhead….

Children with sticky fingers behind old sofas

whisper false secrets.

Slaughtered friends are strung up

like joints of beef in a freezer….

I have stopped riming. Immediately the lid has blown off. Sweat beads my back as I race through the section where voices cry their confessions: the funeral of our common uncle, stealing, spying. Then:

In a house of cinders and bottle glass my alleywise friend

played father to me on her mother’s bed.

Afterwards I washed my hands and stared in the mirror.

When I got home, waited for Mother to read me like a palm.

I knelt. “O God I won’t ever again.”

Till the next afternoon.

As I finish the poem, what Donna says, opening her eyes with her hand shadowing them, is, “I’m not a virgin, Stu.”

I sit up, wondering if I should act surprised. “With Bob or what was his name?”

“With my own sister’s husband.”

“Jim?” His grinning freckled face. Him? “But how?”

She clenches her hands on the clumps of rough grass. Her voice rises muffled. “I came to stay with them in Detroit while she was having her baby. While she was in the hospital, Stu!”

In my own city these things occurred while I was in the attic reading Freud. Estelle is older but I remember her with blond angel curls, bouncing a blue ball. Perhaps I recall not Estelle in the flesh but Uncle Edward the minister’s home movies in which forever as in the mind of God, Estelle pirouettes, in which Donna red-faced and grubby drags a crippled doll and as she bursts into tears, her panties fall down: all uncles and aunts guffaw. “But how? Did he just ask you, or what?”

“When we were making their bed.” Quick rough sobs shake her back. “I worship Estelle, I really do!” Her face twists. Brown mascara stains her cheeks like rust as I try to comfort her.

“Don’t cry!” My hands are catcher’s mitts. What was story is suddenly factual pain. “You didn’t mean to hurt her. She doesn’t know, right?”

“Isn’t that worse? She loves me, because she doesn’t know.”

“Then it doesn’t hurt her,” I say leadenly.

Sitting up she blows her nose. “But it happened again.”

Capsized. In that moment a blunt weariness wilts my bones. Air of damp baby, baby skin, baby hair. Her anguish has worn through and with keen appetite she prepares fresh revelations. That electric springiness, the pain, the turning, are equally real. “How?” I ask.

“Last summer, when they were visiting. Mother and Estelle went shopping that day, while Jim and I stayed with baby. Jim came to my room. Afterward, he made me promise I’d never tell Estelle and I’d never let him do it again.”

“Did you?”

“No.” A small crooked grin. “We haven’t been alone since. And he’s short-tempered with me. Stu, he blames me.”

“He has no right. He should never have done it if he was going to make you feel guilty.”

“He used to tease me. Call me baby doll. But Estelle has always been wonderful. Mother never told me about periods. All she ever said about sex was, ‘Men are beasts.’ When I got acne, it was Estelle who took me right to the doctor to fix it.”

“Donna, listen.” Gripped by vision I squat. “Sex isn’t dirty. Your brother-in-law is a hypocrite, and you had a bad first experience, that’s all.”

“It wasn’t so bad. I mean during it. Afterward I felt like a piece of garbage. I even got religious again. I went to confession and I did almost everything Father Ross told me to, for penance. I got bored though. The second time I didn’t bother. I don’t believe in that crap anyhow.”

“We’ll be the good family for each other. We’ll close ranks and help each other and undo the lies they teach us.”

Her face has dried to a harsh whiteness, though her lids are swollen. “You don’t think I’m rotten?”

“No more than me. We have to find a morality that works for us.” Lolling back I touch my notebook and glow with power like a successful shaman. My poem changed the world and I am not alone.

But she is watching me with a little smile. “I’m glad I wasn’t in your poem along with that Callie girl. I thought I might be.”

It is as if I fall thirty feet as I sit. “In the poem?”

“Because of that time—you remember—when we slept upstairs together at Grandpa’s—when I was fourteen and you were thirteen.” She is watching me warily, her eyes large but that little smile not quite under control.

I know immediately that she is right. I can’t tell her the truth, that I plain forgot. I think she would be insulted. I can’t believe I seduced my own cousin during summer vacation, but at thirteen I didn’t think of it as sex. It was just good old dirty fun. But she knows it’s serious; she learned that too. We’ve both read psychology books. “I don’t think I’m really a lesbian,” I say meekly. I haven’t the faintest idea what I am. An idiot who can forget seducing her cousin, obviously. I’m lucky she didn’t squeal on me to the whole family. I’d be in prison or reform school or the loony bin.

“Of course not,” she says soothingly. “I don’t think you’re really sick. But you must have some experience with men. It’s lopsided. You started off wrong.”

“I haven’t done that in years. I had lots of boyfriends, in the gang. I necked with Freddie a lot. And he tried to rape me once.” Some credentials. The truth is I don’t feel particularly feminine as defined by Mother and the girls in the dorm. I don’t feel male either. I must be something else altogether, like a giraffe maybe. Who can tell the sex of that oak tree scattering acorns on the slope below us? The idea of being fertilized by the wind has a certain appeal when I make my way through the crowd of couples slobbering good night in the courtyard of the dormitory every night, as I return from a walk, a movie or the library.

“You just lack confidence,” she pronounces, biting into a pear once she has inspected it. “If you act attractive, everybody treats you that way.” She eats only fruit that satisfies her exacting standards. I eat the rest. “You eat everything mushy and battered that isn’t squashed flat.”

“Ah, but I draw the line at mold. We all have our principles.” The blue of the sky is dimming. The air grows heavier and colder.

“Principles,” she mutters. “I don’t want to keep seeing Vincent. He’s a little fascist. I have to act stupid with him.”

“I don’t think we should have anything to do with people we have to pretend with.”

“I hate to stay in weekends.”

“There are fourteen thousand men on this campus.”

“What an idea.” Breaking open the cheese, she tosses me a piece. “You know how to cheer me up…. He’ll call tonight. You answer, say I’m out. Be evasive. Imply I’m on a date.”

“Why not just tell him you don’t want to see him?”

“That won’t do. No, do it my way, won’t you?”

“Okay,” I mumble, nervous at the prospect. Giddy with cider we talk, we lie and talk and talk till the sun is a bonfire at the foot of our hill and we are chilly and hungry for even a dorm supper.

CHAPTER FIVE

W
HAT
W
OMEN
A
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M
ADE
F
OR

M
ORNINGS WE LOAD our trays with desiccated eggs, toast, a pat of unidentifiable jelly, bitter coffee. Too sleepy to talk we bolt our food. Julie, who has a single room down the hall and does not eat breakfast, joins us for coffee. Then we hasten together out to the muddy path that runs above the women’s athletic field. Clatter and clank of dishes, women pouring from every door to join the clotted processional downhill and up again. The wind at the brink blows the last wisps of sleep away, leaving us cranky and raw from late studying.

I trot wagging my tail to offer my themes to Professor Bishop. Long face running well up into his scarce hair, long liver-spotted hands whose deft red sarcasms dot my papers, he is the dyspeptic angel who guards the gate to my paradise of words. To seduce his wearily malicious surfeit of freshman prose, I tell him tales of my childhood. He assigns a theme on privilege: I write on Father. He assigns a theme on freedom: I write of Mother. “Amusing.” “Astringent.” The circus of my upbringing stands open for your delectation, Mr. Bishop, although my clowns turn somersaults in terror of your scorn, not at all sure why we are funny.

Slimy grappling in zoology lab. The diagrams in the manual are precise, but my frog holds only eggs. We are handed live frogs to pith their brains. My partner jabs nervously. Blood oozes on the frog’s spotted back as it screams, kicking long and distorted like a saint from El Greco, in my partner’s clumsy fist. Taut with fury I take the frog to drive in the needle, my hand wet with slime and blood. Proud of my successful brutality, I look up to see Donna charging out the door, the lanky lab assistant fluttering behind. “It’s the waste,” she says later. “Killing them and nobody learned a thing. Better to stab those hateful premed students.” She is intransigent even in petty hatred, intense where I am mottled and curious.

I struggle through the central lobby in the liberal arts building known as the Fishbowl. Hot and disheveled I subside into a front seat in a wedge-shaped auditorium to gaze on my idol, Professor Donaldson. I had intended to take ancient or medieval history, ending up in American only because at registration I heard two students gossiping about what a pinko Donaldson is. His classes are standing room only, full to the legal limit of 440 and beyond with those formally or informally auditing.

He starts talking almost before he is in the door. He uses his jacket sleeve to erase what he scrawled earlier, occupying space he requires again. Slim, agile, he is over six feet tall but does not seem so because he droops, his head like a prize dahlia the stem cannot hold upright. I suspect he has grown his full auburn beard to look older than his students. Who could have expected the Pilgrim Fathers to have politics or the Revolutionary War to sound like a real revolution in Bolivia? Since last Wednesday he has broken his glasses. They are held at the hinge with tape I find endearing.

Saturday morning after looking up his address, I drag Donna off to gaze upon what turns out to be a Tudor-style red brick apartment house on North State Street altogether too bland and normal to suit my fantasies. The seventh time around the block, Donna who has never seen Donaldson but is willing to share my infatuation companionably, at last complains. But we are rewarded. He comes out with a woman wearing a trench coat much like his. Chestnut hair in a long single braid. They climb into his blue VW bug and drive off.

“At least you know he likes women,” Donna says. “Can we go home?”

“She didn’t look much older than me. She looks like a student.”

“Twenty-two maybe. Gorgeous boots. Good tweed skirt. Money, I’d say.” Donna has humored me but on the way back she begins to charge interest. “This is ridiculous. You’re comfortable in these crushes. Running across town to spy on him. You could meet him if you wanted to. Just march up to him and preempt his attention.”

“I couldn’t,” I mumble. “Why should he notice me? He has a thousand students at least.”

“Wear your new black turtleneck.”

“A third of his students have tits, Donna. I’m sure he’s seen them before.”

“You’re defeatist, Stu. You can’t drift along this way, having nice safe crushes on men from a distance of two hundred feet.”

Why not? I’m not bored. I’m happy. When I explain this, she becomes more annoyed. “You talk about wanting to experience everything, but it’s all rhetoric. You’re scared.”