In Her Day (17 page)

“Beautiful, honey,” BonBon said in a firm voice.

Creampuff kept on adding more and more English to her drum rolls.

Her voice somewhat sharper, “Beautiful, honey. They all remember the song now. The footlights came up and the spot picked me up as my leg kicked out in front of the curtain. The boys dug that. Really dug it. Legs were important then. Now it’s all tits and teeth. Was I hot that night. Could do no wrong. Yes, I was the Jane Russell of strip. Well, honeys, right in the middle of my number I stepped in a light socket and the juice hits me so hard my wig flies off into the audience and I can’t move! Ya know electricity holds you. I hung there on that socket, my heel stuck in it, vibrating like I had St. Vitus’s dance. The boys went wild. Those asswipes thought it was part of the show. They’re whistling and throwing money and shouting ‘Hot Mama’ and who knows what else. I was so scared I didn’t know whether to shit, run, or go blind. I’d a died out there if Creampuff hadn’t run over to the board and thrown all the switches.”

“I saw my baby out there being electrocuted and I want to tell you I took off like a shot. Knocked down the stage manager, a greasy old fart who weighed three-fifty if he weighed a pound, charged to the switches right behind the curtain there, and hit everything at once. The house went dark and the guys musta’ been creaming in their supporters because they thought by now she was in the altogether. I ran out there on the stage and threw my silk sequined cape over BonBon who couldn’t speak, my god, she was half-fried. We’d been together for about four years then and I thought I was losing the only person in the world who made life worth living. I was bawling and sobbing and stroking her forehead, telling her I loved her and she’d pull through. I promised Jesus my G-string and Virgin Mary my pasties. Management
kept the lights down, of course. Imagine if those sock jocks found out most of us chippies were queer? I don’t know when the ambulance came but I hit the attendant over the head when he tried to keep me out of the back and I crawled in, in full drag mind you, sparkles all through my hair to say nothing of the feathers, and I held Bon’s hand the whole way. I didn’t care who knew.” Creampuff finished out of breath with the violence of her recalled emotion. “That was that,” Bon picked up the thread. “I figured the Good Lord was trying to tell me something so I quit the business and opened my antique shop up on 62nd and Second. Business has been good to us and we have a lovely apartment and the house in the Pines.”

What BonBon didn’t tell was that even in the hospital after the shock she kept her nails long, teased her hair, and put on a full face by noon promptly. She began to see shadows in her mirror when putting on her Revlon nonsmear mascara. BonBon became convinced there were spirits in the room. Not hostile ghosts but spirits trying to tell her something about what to do with her life. Since that time she developed into a closet mystic. Only Creampuff knew how deeply she felt about astrology and the occult. Her friends had the faintest whiff of it when she asked their signs, rising and so forth. Carole told her she was a Sagittarius with temperatures rising but BonBon wheedled her birth date and place out of her and discovered Carole to be a Sagittarius with Libra rising. Adele was an Aries with Libra rising. Bon kept their charts yearly and silently nodded to herself whenever they confirmed her computation by some significant action like the purchase of a painting or catching the flu. But her own life remained a mystery to her and Bon could never quite be sure
why she was put on earth. She decided her mission was to bring joy to her friends and quietly watch over their fortunes like an ancient Aztec scanning the stars.

Bon chattered on, punctuated by Creampuff’s laughter. They never tired of one another. The other inhabitants of the bar, while not exactly spring chickens, were a good deal younger than the dancing group. They stared at the dancers. Their manners and their elegant clothes gave the impression that the older women were slumming. Such women rarely visited the Queen’s Drawer where New Jersey meets the Bronx and lives happily ever after, where the toilets overflowed each night at midnight, and where Marijane Kerr, an old barfly known to all lesbians, had personally painted the plunger with the word
Ladies
in jungle-red nail polish.

How incongruous that they should be in here and after such a night. But then Adele believed in the sovereignty of the incongruous. Checking her watch hidden under her sleeve, she whispered to Carole that it was time to pick up Ilse from Mother Courage.

As they pulled up in front of the restaurant Ilse was in the doorway shouting at a persistent man. They rolled down the windows and the fragrance of cheap wine hit them in the face. He couldn’t walk too well either. There he stood lurching in the doorway while Jill Ward, in a purple undershirt that displayed well-developed arms, quietly moved over to back up Ilse. Two angry faces were too much for him but he managed to garble at full volume as he stumbled off, “Juss what do you women want, anyway?”

“Colorado,” Ilse barked. She noticed the car as he staggered away.

Adele called out, “Greetings, salutations, and all
other forms of hello. Get in, we’ll take you both home.”

Jill, laughing, with her hands on her hips, answered, “No thanks. I’m waiting for Dolores to pick me up.”

Ilse, amazed, came over to the car and looked at Carole.

“What the hell is this?”

“Adele’s surprise. Surprised? We’ve been off tilting windmills. Come on.”

“I can’t be seen riding in this thing.”

“Then lie on the floor,” Adele told her flatly.

Reluctantly Ilse climbed in and hunched on the floor. Not much was said on the way home. Carole embraced Adele and LaVerne as she and Ilse arrived at the well-kept brownstone apartment building.

“Thank you for the unexpected.”

“My pleasure.” Adele kissed her.

As they drove off LaVerne said, “Looks like a fight.”

“Yep.”

Adele pulled her favorite wing chair over to the glass doors in front of the garden. She often liked to sit up late reading, writing, or puzzling in the rare silence of the night. LaVerne woke up each day at seven whether she had to go to work or not. They adjusted over-time to each others internal time clock. Adele would wake up somewhere between ten and eleven and, if it was Saturday or Sunday, LaVerne greeted her with a hot cup of tea as she padded out of the bathroom.

Adele thought, it’s the little things that keep you together. My mother told me that when I used to ask her how she got along with Daddy. I didn’t listen to Mother. Well, I always was a smartass. What was my rallying cry at T.J. High? ‘Yeast in the drain traps. Cherry bomb the toilets.’ Smartass. Should of listened
to Mom—would have saved me the heartbreak of my divorce. Funny word, but papers or no papers, divorce is the same. LaVerne taught me the small kindnesses of everyday life that gradually overwhelm a grandiose act of generosity. The tea in the morning, paying attention to my clothes, fussing over me if I put on a pound. Sometimes I think I don’t do as much for Verne as she does for me. I forget sometimes. I do take her out to dinner once a week at least, and movies whenever there’s one we like. I massage her feet when she’s had a hard day. I wonder how I lived before LaVerne? I can’t even remember. Seems like some dim, uncertain fog. She taught me that each day is the only day. I must find beauty in the day, correct a wrong if I can, fulfill my obligations to my friends, my people, even my country. I can never treat a day as cheap or expect there will be another one. LaVerne calls me “the brain” but she’s the one who taught me what’s most important to know. Carole has that but doesn’t transmit it. No, that’s not fair. I’ve never lived with her or perhaps I’d have picked it up. LaVerne’s background isn’t all that far from Carole’s, a little higher up with money. Maybe that knowledge, that gift is something all poor or near-poor people have: the ability to savor the moment, to laugh out loud.

Mom gave me good advice but for a long time I couldn’t listen. Their battle for whiteness, for respectability is almost heroic if it weren’t so sad. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t listen. There they are sitting in St. Louis in that goddamned mansion on that private street. Every two years without fail, Dad buys a Cadillac. To this day I can’t look at a Cadillac without embarrassment. How vulgar. Couldn’t he buy something less gigantic, less Midwestern? And every two years he buys Mother what he calls “a little runabout
for my sugar,” usually a small-model Buick. Even the runabout can’t fall into the low-priced three. There they sit surrounded by color televisions in the upstairs and downstairs, a small black and white one in the bathroom, electric can openers, electric carving knives, electric face moisturizers, hot combs, blenders, automatic ice crushers. If it’s new and it’s got a button they buy it. And Daddy’s expensive golf clubs. Mom’s a golf widow. She retaliated by taking up tennis. And what astounds me, what knocks me out is that they’re happy. Or maybe they only think they’re happy. Don’t they know they’re supposed to be miserable? I feel waste amid all the appliances. I have yet to meet two more perversely cheerful people. They’ve made it. They sit among all the things that prove they’ve won. I don’t think they’ve won but they do. I guess that’s what’s important. The crowning blow is they’re Republicans. The next thing I know they’ll throw a sit-down dinner for two hundred: tents and music to honor Sammy Davis, Jr. Well, I guess I’m the snob. They didn’t teach me what I wanted to learn but they gave me my chance. I wouldn’t be where I am now if they hadn’t wanted me to make something out of myself. To go farther than they did. They worship money and I turned to the lost beauties of another time. Verne’s right, I don’t give them enough credit. I developed my so-called refined sensibility even if in reaction because of them. Who the hell am I to sit in judgment of my parents, anyway? Dad buys a Cadillac and I rent a Rolls. How’d I get on this jag?

Is that what fascinates me about the Mayas? We see exquisite temples but how did they feel about their parents? Did a woman bring her friend a drink in the morning? I never felt how pressing was the presence of the dead until I went up eighty-four hundred
feet and saw Machu Picchu. There wrapped in clouds sat the fortress city guarded by the Andes standing like sentinels. What a sight! Up to that time my work was the usual blend of curiosity stiffened by pedantry. But after that I was humbled before our ancestors. They’re all our ancestors. And the Mayas were the Inca’s ancestors prefiguring Machu Picchu. I know it’s a cliche but I can’t help falling back on it: we’re a human chain. The dead give to the living and the living must give to each other and we must secure the future for the unborn. The thought comforts me. If I get torn apart in my own time or confused, I at least know I have my place in time. I’m part of this chain. We have a few scraps of Mayan thought. I think the most beautiful is, “Life is a conversation between all living things.” I amend that for myself to include those who went before me and those who come after. Perhaps I was drawn to study these people to learn this. I’m not sure I could have learned it if I remained bound to my own century. I’m an incredibly lucky woman.

She got up with tears in her eyes and tiptoed to the bedroom so she wouldn’t wake up LaVerne.

“A Rolls Royce!”

“Ilse, I had nothing to do with it but if I had I wouldn’t be ashamed of it.”

“For chrissake, a Rolls is the symbol of class oppression. I can’t believe you ignore things like that.”

“A symbol doesn’t equal oppression. My riding in a Rolls Royce doesn’t make me one of the four hundred.”

“Just because you’re not one of them doesn’t mean you don’t identify with them. Don’t you know that’s the secret of American control? The rich get the nonrich to identify with them.”

“You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

“No, I’m not. The symbols of the rich have no place in my life. I don’t identify with rich people and I don’t want other people to identify with them or to lump me with them either. Gucci or Rolls or whatever, it’s all the same to me: disgusting. How can I ride around in a car like that or wear Tiffany earrings? I can’t believe you can’t see it.”

“I don’t give a damn what other people think.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re above all that. Above the struggle and beside the point.”

“Oh, come on now. This is all out of proportion to the incident. I ride in a fancy car one night and you’ve got me owning all of South America.”

“It’s not trivial. Don’t act so consciously reasonable. That infuriates me almost as much as you riding around in that damn car. It’s patronizing. I’m trying to make you understand that you can’t take these things for granted. It’s a new time. People who ride in big cars are objects of hate these days in a way they never were before. Well, I don’t know about the Depression, I mean how people were emotionally. But from what I can see these things like cars and alligator shoes are no longer neutral things. What you do affects other people in a way you don’t seem to understand.”

“One night in that ludicrous car is hardly going to affect anyone, except you.”

“Well, I’m important. But you’re trying to trivialize again. More people than myself saw you in that car.”

“Ilse …”

“Let me finish. What did Jill Ward think? I can just see this dumb story circulating all through the movement.”

“If your getting in the car is so gossip worthy then the movement sounds to me like a disguised
kaffee-klatch
.”

Ilse paused and sighed. “Unfortunately, sometimes it leans in that direction. I console myself with the fact that gossip seems to oil the machinery of any political group whether it’s on the Hill or us. Not much consolation though. I guess I want people to act like they should instead of how they do.”

Carole turned on the stereo and Bobby Short sang “So Near Yet So Far.”

“Look, I’ve told you a thousand times, I don’t give a damn what other people think. I want to live my life as I see fit.”

“And I keep telling you that you confuse individualism with independence.”

“Whenever you get on my case I have the distinct impression you want us all in uniform. Hell, I’m beginning to think individuality went out with the French Revolution.”