Rubyfruit Jungle (22 page)

I hit the road and hitched to Philadelphia. There I got picked up by a truck driver of the male variety who tried to feel me up when I fell asleep, but I snarled at him and he withdrew his offending paw. He dropped me off at the bus station in Lancaster. After an hour’s wait in the hazy lethargy of the Greyhound terminal I boarded the bus. With a rumble it roared off farting thick black pollution in its wake, fouling the low green hills of southeastern Pennsylvania. The hills were also fouled with huge billboards advertising Tanya and Ford and saying “Drink milk, it’s nature’s perfect food.” Every now and then I could catch a glimpse of the countryside through the thickets of advertising.

Once in York, I had to catch two buses, but I finally got to Shiloh. The green bus stopped in front of Mrs. Hershener’s and I jumped out. Same old screen door, same tarpaper shavings in the drive. The porch was half decayed and the Nehi sign had been changed to 7-Up the Uncola but those were the only signs of fifteen years of progress. The road down to Ep’s place was still dirt with a few blue stones thrown on it to pretend it would be serviceable in the rains. The sun was high over my head and milk-white butterflies chased butter-yellow ones over June grass and plowed earth. I took a deep breath of air and got higher than orange sunshine could ever get me.
My feet took off and carried my body down the road. I was running and pumping and pushing those legs that damn near had shin splints from all that New York City pavement. Pretty soon I was waving my arms and yelling and there wasn’t one face to look at me and think, “What’s that nut doing?” There was nobody in sight, just the butterflies.

Around the bend, down the hill, and there was the old frame house. Wash was on the line and the house had a fresh coat of white paint. I went up to the door, out of breath, and knocked, but no one was home. Good, because I didn’t feel like asking anybody if I could go rest by their pond. In the little patch of concrete by the front porch were the two pennies stuck in there when Leroy and I started first grade. “Long as we got those two cents,” Carrie would say, “we ain’t broke.” The rabbit pens were gone and the pig wallow had been planted with pansies and fandango petunias.

The pond was the same old pond. The edge was rimmed with green slime and tall grass full of frogs’ eggs jutted from the still water. Foam gathered around the tall grass. I dropped down by the pool, put my arms behind my head and watched the clouds. After awhile the insects and birds took me for a rock. A caterpillar bumped across my left elbow and a mockingbird was careful to shit on my foot.

I opened my eyes, slowly turned my head, and stared straight into the eyes of the biggest goddamn frog I’d ever seen. That frog wasn’t scared of me, that frog was defiant. It stared at me, blinked then puffed up a red-pink throat and let
out a croak that would have delivered Jericho. From the other side of the pond came a returning belch. And two little green heads peeked out of the water to investigate this mammal on the shore. Amphibians must think we’re inferior creatures since we can’t go in and out of the water the way they can. Besides being biologically superior, that ole frog is more together than I am. That frog doesn’t want to make movies. That frog hasn’t even seen movies and furthermore that frog doesn’t give a big damn. It just swims, eats, makes love, and sings as it pleases. Whoever heard of a neurotic frog? Where do humans get off thinking they’re the pinnacle of evolution?

As if to let me know what it thought of my cognitive processes, the Goliath let out a mighty bellow and flew straight up in the air, terrifying a dragonfly cruising at low altitude. Its four feet touched earth; it hurled itself back into the air and landed in the pond with a truly heroic splash that soaked half my shirt. I sat up and watched the ripples race each other to the edge, where they were lost in the scum; then I saw its huge head pop up out of the weeds. That damn frog winked at me.

I got up, brushed myself off, and trotted down by the gully, through the drainpipe and out the other side and started up the road to Leota’s old house. I congratulated myself on being small enough and skinny enough to slip through the drainpipe.

Mrs. Bisland was still living in that house. The shrubs had grown and it had aluminum siding but other than that, it looked the same. She looked
pretty much the same too except now she was completely gray. She was surprised to see me, fussed over me, and asked how Carrie was and how sorry she was to hear about Carl passing on back there in ’61. Did I know Leota had married Jackie Phantom, who owns a body shop right out in West York, and they’re doing real good? She gave me their address on Diamond Street and I trudged back to Mrs. Hershener’s, went in, and bought a raspberry ice cream cone. The lady behind the counter told me Mrs. Hershener hung herself three years ago and not a soul knew why.

Mrs. Bisland called Leota because she was looking for me. I didn’t have time to knock on the door before it opened and there was Leota—same cat eyes, same languid body, but oh god, she looked forty-five years old and she had two brats hanging on her like possums. I looked twenty-four. She saw herself in my reflection and there was a flicker of pain in her eyes.

“Molly, come in. This is Jackie, Jr. and this is Margie, named for my mother. Say hello to the lady.”

Jackie, Jr. at five could say hello with a reasonable degree of accuracy but Margie hung back. I think she’d never seen a woman in pants before.

“Hello, Margie. Hello, Jackie.”

“Now Jackie take your sister out in the back and play.”

“I don’t wanna take her out and play. I wanna stay here with you.”

“Do as you’re told.”

“No.” He pouted until he near tripped over his lip.

Leota slapped him one on the back, collared
him out the door, and the screams didn’t die down for twenty minutes.

“They drive me crazy sometimes but I love them.”

“Sure,” I said. What else could I say? Every mother says the same thing.

“What brings you to York?”

“Thought I’d take a day out of the big city.”

“Big city? You aren’t in Florida? Oh, that’s right. I believe I did hear from Mother that you’d gone up to New York. Aren’t you afraid you’ll get killed in the streets—all them Puerto Ricans and niggers?”

“No.” There was an awkward silence.

“Not that whites can’t be violent too. But you’re up there where all kinds of people are bunched together. I’m not prejudiced, you understand.”

“I understand.”

“Are you married yet?”

“Don’t you remember? I told you when we were kids that I was never getting married. I kept my promise.”

“Oh, you just haven’t met the right man.” Nervous laugh.

“Right. Everybody says that but it’s a load of shit.”

Her face registered the obscenity but a faint hint of admiration played at the corners of her mouth. “I married Jack right out of high school. I wanted to get out of the house and that was the only way, but I loved him too. He’s a good husband. Works hard, loves the kids. I couldn’t ask for more. You should see Carol Morgan. She married Eddie Harper, remember him? He was two years ahead of us—he drinks himself sick. I was lucky.”

I looked at the neat little house with plastic covers on the furniture and ceramic lamps. The kitchen had a table top full of kidney shapes in thin lines over the formica and there was a bunch of plastic mums as a centerpiece. The living room was an oasis of avocado wall-to-wall carpeting. Leota would have shuddered to see my milk cartons.

Jackie, Jr. either shut up or developed an early case of throat cancer, because at last we could lower our voices.

“Would you like coffee or soda or something?”

“Coke.”

She went into the kitchen and pulled out of an enormous decorator-brown refrigerator a 16 oz. coke. As she walked back to hand it to me, I noticed her body had lost its coiled suppleness and she dragged a bit; her breasts sagged and her hair was dull.

“What are you doing up there in the big city?”

“Finishing up at N.Y.U. I’m in filmmaking.”

She was so impressed. “Are you going to be a movie star? You look a little like Natalie Wood, you know.”

“Thank you for the compliment, but I don’t think I’m movie star material. I want to make the movies, not be one of the pawns in them.”

“Oh”—she couldn’t say any more because it was a mysterious process and all she saw in the end were the movie stars anyway.

“Leota, have you ever thought about that night we spent together?”

Her back stiffened and her eyes receded. “No, never.”

“Sometimes I do. We were so young and I think we must have been kind of sweet.”

“I don’t think about those kinds of things. I’m a mother.”

“What does that do, shut down the part of your brain that remembers the past?”

“I’m too busy for that stuff. Who has time to think? Anyway, that was perverted, sick. I haven’t got time for it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Why did you ask me that? Why’d you come back here—to ask me that? You must have stayed that way. Is that why you’re walking around in jeans and a pullover? You one of those sickies? I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it at all, a pretty girl like you. You could have lots of men. You have more choices than I did here in this place.”

“I thought you said you liked your husband.”

“I love my husband. Love my children. That’s what a woman is made for. It’s just you living in a big city and being educated—you could marry a doctor or a lawyer or even someone in t.v.”

“Leota, I will never marry.”

“You’re crazy. A woman’s got to marry. What’s going to happen to you when you’re fifty? You got to grow old with somebody. You’re going to be sorry.”

“I’m going to be arrested for throwing an orgy at ninety-nine and I’m not growing old with anybody. What a gruesome thought. Christ, you’re twenty-four and you’re worried about being fifty. That makes no sense.”

“Makes all the sense in the world. I have to
think about security. I have to save our money and plan ahead for the children’s educations and our retirement. I didn’t get an education and I want to be sure the kids get them.”

“You could go to school if you wanted to—there are community colleges and all that.”

“I’m too old. Got too much to do. I don’t think I can sit in a classroom and learn any more. It’s fine that you’re doing it, I admire you for it. You can meet a lot of people that way and someday you’ll meet the right one and settle down. You just wait.”

“Let’s stop this shit. I love women. I’ll never marry a man and I’ll never marry a woman either. That’s not my way. I’m a devil-may-care lesbian.”

Leota took her breath in sharply. “You ought to have your head examined, girl. They put people like you away. You need help.”

“Yes, I know people like you who put people like me away. Before you call down the acolytes of Heterosexual Inquisition, I’m splitting.”

“Don’t go using those big words on me, Molly Bolt. You always were a smartass.”

“Yeah—and I was your first lover, too.” I slammed the door and was down the street by the used car lot. She could have died on the spot for all I know.

Now to retrace my steps to Babylon on the Hudson. Back to the place where the air destroys your lungs and the footfall behind you might belong to the hand that slits your throat. Back to where glitzy Broadway hosts the suburbs nightly and calls it the theater. Back to where slick glossies pounce on flesh and serve it up monthly to the nation’s subscription cannibals. Back to
where millions of us live side by side in rotting honeycombs and never say hello. Polluted, packed, putrid, it’s the only place where I have any room, any hope. I got to go back and stick it out. At least in New York City I can be more than a breeder of the next generation.

New York City didn’t greet me with open arms on my return but that didn’t matter. I was determined to deal with all eventualities, even indifference. The remainder of the summer droned on. Fall came as a relief because it would be my senior year and in our senior year we were expected to produce a short film, an accumulation of all our years of study at N.Y.U.

Professor Walgren, head of the department and dedicated misogynist, called me in his office for the routine consideration of a project.

“Molly, what are you going to do for your senior project?”

“I thought I’d do a twenty-minute documentary of one woman’s life.” He seemed unimpressed. Pornoviolence was in this year and all the men were busy shooting bizarre fuck scenes with cuts
of pigs beating up people at the Chicago convention spliced between the sexual encounters. My project was not in that vein.

“You might have trouble getting the camera out for weekends. By the way, who will be in your crew?”

“No one. No one will consent to be my crew.”

Prof. Walgren coughed behind his fashionable wire-rim glasses and said with a slight hint of malice, “Oh, I see, they won’t take orders from a woman, eh?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t noticed they were too good at taking orders from each other.”

“Well, good luck on your film. I’ll be eager to see what you crank out.”

Sure you will, you fake-hippie, middle-aged washout.