Lives of Girls and Women (28 page)

I. We were depressed at being paired off like the only members of some outlandish species in a zoo, and we resented people thinking we were alike, for we did not think so. I thought that Jerry was a thousand times more freakish, less attractive than I was, and it was plain that he thought putting my brains and his in the same category showed no appreciation of categories; it was like saying Toscanini and the local bandmaster were both talented. What I possessed, he told me frankly when we discussed the future, was a first-rate memory, a not unusual feminine gift for language, fairly weak reasoning powers and almost no capacity for abstract thought. That I was immeasur-ably smarter than most people in Jubilee should not blind me, he said, to the fact that I would soon reach my limits in the intellectually competitive world outside (“The same goes for myself,” he added severely. “I always try to keep a perspective. I look pretty good at Jubilee High School. How would I look at M.I.T.?” In talking of his future he was full of grand ambitions, but was careful to express them sarcastically, and fence them round with sober self-admonitions.)

I took his judgement like a soldier, because I did not believe it. That is, I knew it was all true, but I still felt powerful enough, in areas that I thought he could not see, where his ways of judging could not reach. The gymnastics of his mind I did not admire, for people only admire abilities similar to, though greater than, their own. His mind to me was like a circus tent full of dim apparatus on which, when I was not there, he performed stunts which were spectacular and boring. I was careful not to let him see I thought this. He was truthful in telling me what he thought about me, apparently; I had no intention of being so with him. Why not? Because I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it: I had an indifference, a contempt almost, that I concealed from him. I thought that I was tactful, even kind; I never thought that I was proud.

We went to movies together. We went to school dances, and danced badly, self-consciously, irritated with each other, humiliated by the disguise of high school sweethearts which we had somehow felt it necessary to adopt, until we found that the way to survive the situation was to make fun of it. Parody, self-mockery, were our salvation. At our best we were cheerful, comfortable, sometimes cruel comrades, rather like a couple who have been married for eighteen years. He called me
Eggplant,
in honour of a dreadful dress I had, a purply-wine coloured taffeta, made over from one Fern Dogherty had left behind. (We were suddenly poorer than usual, due to the collapse of the silver fox business after the war.) I had hoped, while my mother was altering it, that the dress would turn out to be all right, would even show a voluptuous sheen on my rather wide hips, like the Rita Hayworth dress in the ads for
Gilda;
when I put it on I tried to tell myself that this was so, but as soon as Jerry made a face and gulped exaggeratedly and said in a squeaky, delighted voice, “Eggplant!” I knew the truth. Immediately I tried to find it as funny as he did, and nearly succeeded. On the street we improvised further.

“Attending last evening’s gala midwinter dance at the Jubilee Armouries were Mr. Jerry Storey the third, scion of the fabulous fertilizer family, and the exquisite Miss Del Jordan, heiress to the silver fox empire, a couple who dazzle all beholders with the unique and indescribable style of their dancing—”

Many of the movies we went to were about the war, which had ended a year before we started high school. Afterwards we would go to Haines’s Restaurant, preferring it to the Blue Owl where nearly everybody else from the high school went, to play the jukebox and the pinball machines. We drank coffee and smoked menthol cigarettes. Between the booths there were high, dark wooden partitions, topped by fanlights of dark-gold glass. Creasing a paper napkin into geometrical designs, wrapping it around a spoon, tearing it into fluttering strips, Jerry talked about the war. He gave me a description of the Bataan Death March, methods of torture in Japanese prison camps, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, the destruction of Dresden; he bombarded me with unbeatable atrocities, annihilating statistics. All without a flicker of protest, but with a controlled excitement, a curious insistent relish. Then he would tell me about the weapons now being developed by the Americans and the Russians; he made their destructive powers seem inevitable, magnificent, useless to combat as the forces of the universe itself.

“Then biological warfare—they could reintroduce the bubonic plague—they’re making diseases there are no antidotes for, storing them up. Nerve gas—how about controlling a whole population by semistupifying drugs—”

He was certain there would be another war, we would all be wiped out. Cheerful, implacable behind his brainy boy’s glasses, he looked ahead to prodigious catastrophe. Soon, too. I responded with conventional horror, tentative female reasonableness, which would excite him into greater opposition, make it necessary to horrify me further, argue my reasonableness down. This was not hard to do. He was in touch with the real world, he knew how they had split the atom. The only world I was in touch with was the one I had made, with the aid of some books, to be peculiar and nourishing to myself. Yet I hung on; I grew bored and cross and said all right, suppose this is true, why do you get up in the morning and go to school? If its all true, why do you plan on being a great scientist?

“If the world is finished, if there is no hope, then why
do
you?” “There is still time for me to get the Nobel Prize,” he said blasphe mously, to make me laugh.

“Ten years?”

“Give it twenty. Most great breakthroughs are made by men under thirty-five.”

After he had said something like this he would always mutter, “You know I’m kidding.” He meant about the Nobel Prize, not the war. We could not get away from the Jubilee belief that there are great, supernatural dangers attached to boasting, or having high hopes of yourself. Yet what really drew and kept us together were these hopes, both denied and admitted, both ridiculed and respected in each other.

On Sunday afternoons we liked to go for long walks, along the railway tracks, starting behind my house. We would walk out to the trestle over the big bend in the Wawanash River, then back. We talked about euthanasia, genetic control of populations, whether there is such a thing as a soul, whether or not the universe is ultimately knowable. We agreed on nothing. At first we were walking in the fall, then in the winter. We would walk in snowstorms, arguing with our heads down, hands in our pockets, the fine bitter snow in our faces. Worn out with arguing, we would take our hands out of our pockets and spread our arms out for balance and try to walk the rails. Jerry had long frail legs, a small head, curly hair, round bright eyes. He wore a plaid cap with fleece-lined earflaps, which I remembered him wearing ever since the sixth grade.

I remembered that I used to laugh at him, as everybody else did. I was still sometimes ashamed to be seen with him, by somebody like Naomi. But I thought now there was something admirable, an odd, harsh grace about the way he conformed to type, accepting his role in Jubilee, his necessary and gratifying absurdity, with a fatalism, even gallantry, which I would never have been able to muster myself. This was the spirit in which he appeared at dances, steered me spastically over the treacherous miles of floor, in which he swung uselessly at the ball in the yearly, obligatory baseball game, and marched with the Cadets. He offered up himself, not pretending to be an ordinary boy, but doing the things an ordinary boy would do, knowing that his performance could never be acceptable, people would always laugh. He could not do otherwise; he was what he seemed. I whose natural boundaries were so much more ambiguous, who soaked up protective coloration wherever it might be found, began to see that it might be restful, to be like Jerry.

He came to my house for supper, against my will. I hated bringing him up against my mother. I was afraid that she would be excited, try to outdo herself in some way, because of his brainy reputation. And she did; she tried to get him to explain relativity to her—nodding, encouraging, fairly leaping at him with facile cries of understanding. For once, his explanations were incoherent. I was critical of the meal, as I always was before company; the meat seemed overdone, the potatoes slightly hard, the canned beans too cool. My father and Owen had come in from the Flats Road, because it was Sunday. Owen lived out on the Flats Road all the time now, and cultivated churlishness. While Jerry talked, Owen chewed noisily and directed at my father looks of simple, ignorant, masculine contempt. My father did not answer these looks but talked little, perhaps embarrassed by my mother’s enthusiasm, which he might have thought enough for them both. I was angry at everybody. I knew that to Owen, and to my father too—though he would not show it, he would know it was only one way of looking at things—Jerry was a freak, shut out of the world of men; it did not matter what he knew. They were too stupid, it seemed to me, to see that he had power. And to him my family were part of the great mass of people to whom it is not even worth while to explain things; he did not see that they had power. Insufficient respect was being shown all round.

“It makes me laugh the way people think they can ask a few questions and get to understand something, without knowing any of the groundwork.”

“Laugh then,” I said sourly. “I hope you enjoy yourself.”

But my mother had taken a liking to him, and from then on lay in wait for him, to know his opinions about laboratory-created life, or machines taking over man. I could understand how her hectic flow of questions baffled and depressed him. Wasn’t this how I had felt when he himself grabbed
Look Homeward Angel
off the top of my pile of books—I was taking it back to the Library—and opened it and read in flat-voiced puzzlement,
“A stone, a leaf, a door—O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost—”
I snatched it back from him, as if it was in danger. “Well what does that
mean
?” he said reasonably. “To me it just sounds stupid. Explain it to me. I’m willing to listen.”

“He is extremely shy,” my mother said. “He is a brilliant boy but he must learn to put himself across better.”

It was easier having supper at his place. His mother was the widow of a teacher. He was her only child. She worked as the high school secretary, so I knew her already. They lived in half of a double house out on the Diagonal Road. The dishtowels were folded and ironed like the finest linen handkerchiefs and kept in a lemon-scented drawer. For dessert we had molded Jello pudding in three colours, rather like a mosque, full of canned fruit. After supper Jerry went into the front room to work on the weekly chess problem he received through the mail (an example of what I mean about his pure, impres-sive conforming to type) and shut the glass doors so our talking would not distract him. I dried the dishes. Jerry’s mother talked to me about his IQ. She spoke as if it were some rare object—an archaeo-logical find, maybe, something immensely valuable and rather scary, which she kept wrapped up in a drawer.

“You have a very nice IQ yourself,” she said reassuringly (all records were open to her, in fact were kept by her, at the school) “but you know Jerry’s IQ puts him in the top
quarter
of the top 1 per cent of the population. Isn’t it amazing to think of that? And here I am his mother, what a responsibility!”

I agreed it was.

“He will be years and years at University. He will have to get his Ph.D. Then they even go on after that, post doctoral, I don’t
know
what all. Years.”

I thought by her sober tone she was going to go on to talk about the expense.

“So you mustn’t get into trouble, you know,” she said matter-of-factly. “Jerry couldn’t get married. I wouldn’t allow it. I have seen these cases of young men forced to sacrifice their lives because some girl has got pregnant and I don’t think its right. You and I have both seen it, you know the ones I mean, in the school. Shotgun weddings. That’s the style in Jubilee. I don’t agree with it. I never did. I don’t agree that it’s the boy’s responsibility and he should have to sacrifice his career. Do you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think you would. You are too intelligent. Do you have a diaphragm?” She said that like a flash.

“No,” I said numbly.

“Well why don’t you get one? I know the way it is with you young girls nowadays. Virginity is all a thing of the past. So be it. I don’t say I approve or disapprove but you can’t turn back the clock, can you? Your mother, she should have taken you in and got you fitted. That’s what I would do, if I had a daughter.”

She was much shorter than I was, a plump but smart little woman, hair fluffy yellow, tulip colour, grey roots showing. She always had earrings and brooches and necklaces in bright, matching, plastic colours. She smoked, and allowed Jerry to smoke in the house; in fact they were always squabbling in a comradely, husband-and-wifely way about whose cigarettes were whose. I had been prepared to find her very modern in her ideas, not as modern as my mother intellectually—who was?—but a great deal more modern about ordinary things. But I had not been prepared for this. I looked down at her grey roots as she said that about my mother taking me to get me fitted for a diaphragm and I thought of my mother, who would publicly campaign for birth control but would never even think she needed to talk to me, so firmly was she convinced that sex was something no woman—no
intelligent
woman—would ever submit to unless she had to. I really liked that better. It seemed more fitting, in a mother, than Jerry’s mother’s preposterous acceptance, indecent practicality. I thought it quite offensive for a mother to mention intimacies a girl might be having with her own son. The thought of intimacies with Jerry Storey was offensive in itself. Which did not mean that they did not, occasionally, take place.

Why offensive? It was a strange thing. Heavyheartedness prevailed, as soon as we left off talking. Our hands lay moistly together, each one of us wondering, no doubt, how long in decent courtesy they must remain. Our bodies fell against each other not unwillingly but joylessly, like sacks of wet sand. Our mouths opened into each other, as we had read and heard they might, but stayed cold, our tongues rough, mere lumps of unlucky flesh. Whenever Jerry turned his attention on me—this special sort of attention—I grew irritable and did not know why. But I was, after all, morosely submissive. Each of us was the only avenue to discovery that the other had found.