Lady Oracle (10 page)

“Well, everyone kills a few people in a war, I guess,” said the second man.

“Up close?” said my mother. “I bet you didn’t kill them up close.”

There was a silence, of the kind that comes into a room when everyone knows that something exciting and probably unpleasant is going to happen. I could picture my mother looking around at the attentive faces, avoiding my father’s eyes.

“He was in Intelligence,” she said importantly. “You wouldn’t think it to look at him, would you? They dropped him in behind the lines and he worked with the French underground. You wouldn’t ever hear it from him, but he can speak French like a native; he gets it from his last name.”

“My,” said one of the women, “I’ve always wanted to go to Paris. Is it as beautiful as they say?”

“His job was to kill the people they thought were fakes,” my mother continued. “He had to just take them out and shoot them. In cold blood. Sometimes he wouldn’t even know if he’d shot the right one. Isn’t that something?” Her voice was thrilled and admiring. “The funny thing is, he doesn’t like me to mention it … the funny thing is, he told me once that the frightening thing about it was, he started to
enjoy
it.”

One of the men laughed nervously. I got up and retreated on my furry slippered feet to the stairs (I could walk quietly enough when I wanted to) and lowered myself down halfway up. Sure enough, a moment later my father marched through the swinging door into
the kitchen, followed by my mother. She must have realized she had pushed it too far.

“There’s nothing
wrong
with it,” she said. “It was in a good cause. You never make the most of yourself.”

“I asked you not to talk about it,” my father said. He sounded very angry, enraged. It was the first time I realized he could feel rage; he was usually very calm. “You have no idea what it was like.”

“I think it’s great,” said my mother, earnestly. “It took real courage, I don’t see what’s wrong with.…”

“Shut up,” said my father.

Those are stories from later; earlier he wasn’t there, which is probably why I remember him as nicer than my mother. And after that he was busy studying, he was someone who was not to be disturbed, and then he was at the hospital a lot. He didn’t know quite what to make of me, ever; though I never felt he was hostile, only bemused.

The few things we did together were wordless things. Such as: he took to growing house plants – vines and spider plants and ferns and begonias. He liked to tinker with them, snipping off cuttings and repotting and planting, on Saturday afternoons if he had the free time, listening to the Texaco Company Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the radio, and he would let me help him with the plants. As he never said much of anything, I would pretend his voice was the voice of Milton Cross, kindly and informed, describing the singers’ costumes and the passionate, tragic and preposterous events in which they were involved. There he would be, puffing away on the pipe he took up after he quit cigarettes, poking at his house plants and conversing to me about lovers being stabbed or abandoned or betrayed, about jealousy and madness, about unending love triumphing over the grave; and then those chilling voices would drift into the room, raising the hair on the back of my neck, as if he had evoked them. He was a conjuror of spirits, a shaman with the voice
of a dry, detached old opera commentator in a tuxedo. Or that’s how I imagined him sounding, when I thought up the conversations I would have liked to have had with him but never did. I wanted him to tell me the truth about life, which my mother would not tell me and which he must have known something about, as he was a doctor and had been in the war, he’d killed people and raised the dead. I kept waiting for him to give me some advice, warn me, instruct me, but he never did any of these things. Perhaps he felt as if I weren’t really his daughter; he’d seen me for the first time five years after I was born, and he treated me more like a colleague than a daughter, more like an accomplice. But what was our conspiracy? Why hadn’t he come back on leave during those five years? A question my mother asked also. Why did they both act as though he owed my mother something?

Then there were those other conversations I overheard. I used to go into the upstairs bathroom, lock the door, and turn on the tap so they would think I was brushing my teeth. Then I would arrange the bath mat on the floor so my knees wouldn’t get cold, put my head into the toilet, and listen to them through the pipes. It was almost a direct line to the kitchen, where they had most of their fights, or rather my mother had them. She was a lot easier to hear than my father.

“Why don’t you try doing something with her for a change, she’s your daughter, too. I’m really at the end of my rope.”

My father: silence.

“You don’t know what it was like, all alone with her to bring up while you were over there enjoying yourself.”

My father: “I didn’t enjoy myself.”

And once: “It’s not as though I wanted to have her. It’s not as though I wanted to marry you. I had to make the best of a bad job if you ask me.”

My father: “I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out for you.”

And once, when she was very angry: “You’re a doctor, don’t tell me you couldn’t have done something.”

My father: (inaudible).

“Don’t give me that crap, you killed a lot of people. Sacred my foot.”

At first I was shocked, mainly by my mother’s use of the word
crap
. She tried so hard to be a lady in front of other people, even me. Later I tried to figure out what she’d meant, and when she’d say, “If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be here,” I didn’t believe her.

I ate to defy her, but I also ate from panic. Sometimes I was afraid I wasn’t really there, I was an accident; I’d heard her call me an accident. Did I want to become solid, solid as a stone so she wouldn’t be able to get rid of me? What had I done? Had I trapped my father, if he really was my father, had I ruined my mother’s life? I didn’t dare to ask.

For a while I wanted to be an opera singer. Even though they were fat they could wear extravagant costumes, nobody laughed at them, they were loved and praised. Unfortunately I couldn’t sing. But it always appealed to me: to be able to stand up there in front of everyone and shriek as loud as you could, about hatred and love and rage and despair, scream at the top of your lungs and have it come out music. That would be something.

“S
ometimes I think you haven’t got a brain in your head,” my mother used to say. When I was crying, for some invalid reason or other. To her mind, tears were an evidence of stupidity. I’ll give you something to cry about. That’s nothing to cry about. Don’t cry over spilled milk.

“I’m lonely,” I told her. “I don’t have anyone to play with.”

“Play with your dolls,” she said, outlining her mouth.

I did play with them, those crotchless frizzy-haired plastic goddesses, with their infantile eyes and their breasts that emerged and receded gently as knees, unalarming, devoid of nipples. I dressed them up for social events they never attended, undressed them again and stared at them, wishing they would come alive. They were chaste, unloved, widowed: in those days there were no male dolls. They danced by themselves or stood against the wall, catatonic.

When I was nine I tried for a dog. I knew I wouldn’t get one but I was softening her up for a kitten; I’d been offered one by a girl at school whose cat had six, one with seven toes on each foot. This was
the one I wanted. What I really wanted was a baby sister but this was out of the question, and even I knew it. I’d heard her say over the phone that one was more than enough. (Why wasn’t she happier? Why could I never make her laugh?)

“Who would feed it?” my mother asked. “Three times a day.”

“I would,” I said.

“You wouldn’t,” my mother said, “you don’t come home for lunch.” Which was true, I took my lunch to school in a lunch box.

With the kitten it was house-training and scratching the furniture. Next I tried a turtle; there didn’t seem much that could go wrong with a turtle, but my mother said it would be smelly.

“No it wouldn’t,” I said, “they’ve got one at school and it doesn’t smell.”

“It would get lost behind the furniture,” my mother said, “and starve to death.”

She wouldn’t hear of a guinea pig or a hamster or even a bird. Finally after nearly a year of failures I backed her into a corner. I asked for a fish. It would be noiseless, odorless, germ-free and clean; after all, it lived in water. I wanted it to have a bowl with colored pebbles and a miniature castle.

She couldn’t think of any good reason why not, so she gave in and I bought a goldfish at Kresge’s. “It will only die,” my mother said. “Those cheap goldfish all have diseases.” But when I’d had it a week she did give in enough to ask me its name. I was sitting with my eye against the glass, watching it as it swam up to the top and back down again, burping out pieces of its food.

“Susan Hayward,” I said. I had just seen
With a Song in My Heart
, in which Susan Hayward made a comeback from a wheelchair. The odds were stacked against this goldfish and I wanted it to have a courageous name. It died anyway; my mother said it was my fault, I overfed it. Then she flushed it down the toilet before I had a chance
to weep over it and bury it properly. I wanted to replace it but my mother said that surely I had learned my lesson. I was always supposed to be learning some lesson or other.

My mother said movies were vulgar, though I suspected she’d once gone to a lot of them; otherwise how would she know about Joan Crawford? So it was my Aunt Lou who took me to see Susan Hayward. “There, you see?” she said to me afterwards. “Red hair can be very glamorous.”

Aunt Lou was tall and heavy and built like an Eaton’s Catalog corset ad for the mature figure, but she didn’t seem to mind. She piled her graying yellowish hair onto the top of her head and stuck extravagant hats with feathers and bows onto the mound with pearl hatpins and wore bulky fur coats and heavy tweeds, which made her look even taller and fatter. In one of my earliest memories of her I’m sitting on her wide, woolly lap – hers was the only lap I remember sitting on, and my mother would say, “Get down, Joan, don’t bother your Aunt Louisa” – and stroking the fur of the fox she wore around her neck. This was a real fox, it was brown, it wasn’t as mangy as it later became; it had a tail and four paws, black beady eyes and a cool plastic nose, though underneath its nose, instead of a lower jaw, it had a clamp by which it held its tail in place. Aunt Lou would open and shut the clamp and pretend that the fox was talking. It often revealed secrets, such as where Aunt Lou had hidden the gumdrops she had brought me, and it asked important questions also, like what I wanted for Christmas. When I grew older this game was dropped, but Aunt Lou still kept the fox in her closet, although it had gone out of style.

Aunt Lou took me to the movies a lot. She loved them, especially the ones that made you cry; she didn’t think a movie was much good unless it made you cry. She rated pictures as two-Kleenex, three-Kleenex or four-Kleenex ones, like the stars in restaurant guides. I
wept also, and these binges of approved sniveling were among the happiest moments of my childhood.

First there was the delightful feeling of sneaking out on my mother; for although she claimed to give her consent when I asked permission, I knew she didn’t really. Then we would take the streetcar or a bus to the theater. In the lobby we would stock up on pocket-packs of Kleenex, popcorn and candy bars; then we would settle down in the furry, soothing darkness for several hours of guzzling and sniffling, as the inflated heroines floating before us on the screen were put through the wringer.

I suffered along with sweet, patient June Allyson as she lived through the death of Glenn Miller; I ate three boxes of popcorn while Judy Garland tried to cope with an alcoholic husband, and five Mars Bars while Eleanor Parker, playing a crippled opera singer, groped her mournful way through
Interrupted Melody
. But the one I liked best was
The Red Shoes
, with Moira Shearer as a ballet dancer torn between her career and her husband. I adored her: not only did she have red hair and an entrancing pair of red satin slippers to match, she also had beautiful costumes, and she suffered more than anyone. I munched faster and faster as she became more and more entangled in her dilemma – I wanted those things too, I wanted to dance and be married to a handsome orchestra conductor, both at once – and when she finally threw herself in front of a train I let out a bellowing snort that made people three rows ahead turn around indignantly. Aunt Lou took me to see it four times.

I saw a number of
Adult
pictures long before I was an adult, but no one ever questioned my age. I was quite fat by this time and all fat women look the same, they all look forty-two. Also, fat women are not more noticeable than thin women; they’re less noticeable, because people find them distressing and look away. To the ushers and the ticket sellers I must’ve appeared as a huge featureless blur. If
I’d ever robbed a bank no witness would have been able to describe me accurately.

We would come out of the movie red-eyed, our shoulders still heaving, but with a warm feeling of accomplishment. Then we would go for a soda or two or for a snack at Aunt Lou’s apartment – grilled crab-meat sandwiches with mayonnaise, cold chicken salad. She kept a number of these things in her refrigerator or in cans on her cupboard shelves. Her apartment building was an older one, with dark wood trim and large rooms. The furniture was dark and large, too, frequently dusty and always cluttered: newspapers on the chesterfield, afghan shawls on the floor, odd shoes or stockings under the chairs, dishes in the sink. To me this disorder meant you could do what you liked. I imitated it in my own bedroom, scattering clothes and books and chocolate-bar wrappers over the surfaces so carefully planned by my mother, the dressing table with the sprigged muslin flounce, bedspread to match, rug in harmony. This was the only form of interior decoration I ever did, and the drawback was that sooner or later it had to be cleaned up.