This Is Not for You (2 page)

“I love the Cloisters,” you said, regretfully.

“Doing what?”

“Feeding peanuts to the unicorns,” Saul answered, slumping into the chair a waiter had brought.

“I thought unicorns ate nothing but virgins,” I said.

“That’s why unicorns are starving in New York,” Saul answered with pure, fourteen-year-old cynicism.

“Did you buy any prints?” you asked.

“Two, a little one for you and a big one for me. I don’t know about taking unicorns to Britain, like coals to Newcastle maybe.” Saul shrugged and began to sprinkle salt on the table in front of him.

“You’re so nervous, darling.”

“It’s my Oedipus complex.”

It was time then to feel sorry for your mother. She had two such unsuitable children, no matter how interesting. And, say what you like about the persecution of children by parents, the parents are finally the victims. They are not expected to rebel, even though they are the dominated ones for the real length of most parent-child relationships. Your mother was at the beginning of that domination, and no one had taught her any handsome or generous way to suffer. She has since learned a lot.

During that meeting, for all her failure with you, she did succeed in adding weight to the burden of responsibility I already felt. Why, with you, did I always feel responsible? You were a year older than I (that year we were nineteen and twenty), and you were neither stupid nor reckless. Impractical, yes, and trusting.

I keep speaking of your qualities as if I were writing a letter of recommendation. But people did—and probably still do—misunderstand you. Or at least they misunderstood what you have done and are doing. I should not pretend to be any different from the others. It is not that I have superior insight. It is not even that I have cared more. Simply, I was more important than the others to you, failed you in ways you could rationalize, an ability which may be one basis for a lasting friendship.

I have wondered what might have happened if you had not, from the first day we met, placed me on so high a pedestal that I couldn’t get down. You were not entirely to blame. I often liked it up there, and, when I didn’t, all I had to do was to move to the edge to see what a long way I had to fall. For you, I was not alone. Over the years, you had quite a number of us, self-conscious heroes and heroines, disdainful of each other’s stances in your garden of honor. Jason was the first I met that day at lunch, and, if I was not impressed with his mayonnaise-threatened beard, he was as unresponsive to my raw-boned, bird-eyed suspiciousness. Your friends usually didn’t like each other because embarrassment is not an interest to be shared.

If I had been a little older, a little less frightened, I might at least have been able to sit down, let my feet dangle over the edge, send you a rueful whistle through my teeth, and then say, little dog, listen. What I had to confess was no more than ordinarily grotesque. That was the trouble for me. I suffered so uncommonly from such common fears.

When you spoke of being called a Jew for nothing more than a last name and a dark complexion, guilty with wanting to reject a label which did not identify you, why did I listen in such superior, if also sympathetic, silence? I had my own stories to tell, being the illegitimate child of an Indian woman and a white man, a half-breed, adopted by an Episcopal minister and his wife who had already raised their own daughter. As a child, I was never called an Indian, a half-breed, or any of the variety of crude, colloquial terms every region has for its natives. My background was never mentioned to me by my adopted parents on the theory that I was to be made to feel no separation from them. And I half forgot it myself, growing up in the world given me. If I could have said to you, we suffer from opposite uncertainties, opposite guilts, I would have said it; but that was not really true. Yours was essentially a religious problem, no matter how else it was presented to you from the outside as a question of racial identity, integrity, courage. I believed you could establish your innocence, your freedom to choose. You wanted to. You did not secretly cherish the suffering you felt false heir to. I did.

And you talked with candor about your ugliness. Mildly, you envied Monk her sexual trials in parked cars, though, in those days, you believed in the old-fashioned romance of giving yourself once, wholly, to someone wholly chosen. Perhaps accepting ugliness is the beginning of beauty. Monk never was given the opportunity, limited from the age of fifteen by prizes from beauty contests, fulfilling the myth that the American female now skips the awkward age. You were old-fashioned, suffering the sexual change which at first coarsens the features, corrupts the skin, violates the appetite, and finally establishes a humility which the spirit struggles with long after the body has survived. And you were further protected—or discriminated against—because you were born into a culture that does not recognize your kind of beauty, can be suspicious of it, even occasionally repelled. Only once before you were twenty was your ugliness clearly denied.

You had been working in the sculpture studio on one of those unconsciously comic female thinkers which in those days obsessed you when the instructor, an impatient middle European, suddenly shouted, “Always swollen heads and fallen tits! Why? Have you no mirror, Cleopatra? Look at
yourself.
See what a woman is!”

You told me about it with his accent and his gestures.

“It is the high breasts,” shaking your own fists at your collar bones, “the small head for beauty,” turning your chin as if with his hand. “Egypt.”

You paused then, looking at yourself doubtfully in the long mirror on my closet door.

“Kate, I couldn’t possibly be beautiful.”

Standing there in blue jeans and one of Saul’s old shirts, your dead father’s watch hanging on your wrist, clay drying in the circles of your finger nails, you didn’t believe him. What should I have said? I could not say anything, nor could I turn away, caught by what you couldn’t see.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” you chanted, “who’s the fairest of them all? Not you, little dog.”

It was a bad nickname, one only I used, having given it to you because you would walk just half a step behind me with a shorter stride, with a trot if I hurried. Like so much else that you could have found offensive, it amused you.

That night, after we had argued about art as imitation or incarnation, you giving in to the temptation of a Christian esthetic, I looked at myself in the same mirror, but did not ask the same question, not looking for your kind of answer. I liked my face well enough, its high cheekbones and strong nose, the dark, carefully remote eyes. I hardly noticed my body, instrument not object. “How am I to use myself? What am I to do?”

At college, where we had roommates and lectures to go to and papers to write, we could discuss your problems and ignore mine. Traveling, we had to encounter each other’s difficulties, your vagueness and my obsession with details, your fear of most adults and my reluctance with strangers, your exhaustion and my restlessness. We had to encounter each other. And I had not wanted to.

I tried to explain my adopted sister and brother-in-law to you before we arrived in London; but, because they were old enough to be my parents, they were automatically your enemies, not in the real way they might have been, but simply dismissed into the dull world of authority and responsibility. Any man who went to the office, any woman who went shopping and dealt with servants and had her hair done could not possibly have anything to say to you. Frank, who is not easily offended, was the first man I saw suffer from your childishness. Doris was curious at first, then bewildered, but she never quite gave up. Last time I saw her, she asked about you. She said, when I told her what you’d done, “Well, He’s the one grown-up Who will let her go on being a child.” Doris, like so many children of ministers, had found having two fathers a bit much. I had more in common with you, having lost the only human father I knew when I was twelve, but I did not allow us to make common cause over that, either. Frank had been an unintrusive but willing substitute for official purposes. I think he was genuinely fond of me. It was gaining a second mother in Doris that was difficult. She was capable of being as suspicious as your mother, but she had never learned to be fearful. She invaded my privacy with more shrewd concern and indulgent affection than I could understand or handle. It might have been better for me if she had either never appeared or had been home more often.

Except for the war years, Doris visited Mother and me in the Bay Area once a year when Frank came to the States on business. She always brought me new novels and plays, and I did like discussing them with her, but I was as uneasy as I was flattered by the value she placed on my opinions, which were often based on experience she credited me with rather than experience I had had. With everyone else I had a more certain role.

In my last year in high school, I was captain of the debating team, captain of the swimming team, my top drawer rattling with medals for good attendance, good sportsmanship, good scholarship, good Godliness—a joy to my teachers and my elderly mother, a pain in the ass to my classmates, who were, just the same, never rude. I was at that time threatening to be a national swimming champion, which awed them a little and worried me a lot. I liked the prestige, but I hated racing. I was of two minds about entering a qualifying meet, but the coach, who had offered to take me to Carmel for it, persuaded my mother and Doris that I should go.

We drove down the afternoon before, checked in to a guest-house my mother was fond of, walked on the beach for an hour, then went out for an early dinner. The town was full of Rotarians. At the third restaurant we tried, we finally agreed to wait an hour in the bar. When my age wasn’t questioned and the coach suggested I have a cocktail, I agreed. Unlike you, I had always wanted to be an adult and was willing to make any of the appropriate gestures. Somehow we got into a friendly argument with four men at the next table. The coach was a Democrat; they were Republicans. That’s how it seemed to me then, but, of course, the coach was also a young woman, healthily attractive as gym teachers are supposed to be. More drinks came, and more. We did finally eat, and our Rotarians delivered us to our guest-house rather too noisily, shouting Republican slogans at our window long after they should have gone home.

I had not been drunk before, never having had the opportunity. I did not intend to be drunk then, and I was concerned about the noise we were making, troubled by the heavy uncertainty of my feet and tongue. My companion decided to take a bath. I was left with the complicated task of undressing myself. It must have taken me a long time. Finally I stood at the basin, thinking of brushing my teeth, washing my face, then trying to find my pajamas. As I stood there, a glass on the shelf fell into the basin and smashed. There were four glasses, and one by one they all fell while I stood watching. It seemed to me incredibly sad that every one should break. I began to cry. Perhaps her embrace began as a gesture of comfort. I was not surprised by it, nor by being put to bed. I was surprised by what she was saying, words I had read on fences and in literature but had never heard pronounced before.

“That’s what they say: give a little clootch whiskey, and what you’ve got is nothing but a piece of fucking tail, a little redskin cunt.”

I listened, so close to unconsciousness that it was easier to seem so than to sort out the appropriate response. I wanted to solve the problem about the broken glasses and I wanted to be sure the Rotarians had really gone home and I wanted to listen for stress, for accurate pronunciation just as I did in German class, and I wanted to go on trying to feel what I had begun to feel. The glasses began to fall again, but slowly this time, and they broke slowly in showers of light.

“Don’t cry Don’t cry. It’s nothing to cry about.”

The next morning we did not discuss anything that had happened the night before. We agreed that breakfast was not a good idea. I had to swim at ten o’clock; we’d eat afterwards. It did not occur to me to refuse to swim. It was important to behave as if nothing unusual had happened.

I could not make myself go into the pool to warm up. I stood in my dry suit, my feet and hands blue in the warm morning sun, waiting to be forced by the gun. Only after I hit the water did I discover that it was salt. I swam eight lengths of the pool, my teeth clenched against my rebelling guts, touched in, lifted myself half out of the pool, and vomited with fountain force to the cheering crowd. It is the only record I have ever set. I never swam in a race again. If that had been the humiliating end of it, I would have felt punished enough for my sins, but we had a three-hour drive home after that, and the lead item on the sports page the next day would be
NEW NATIONAL RECORD SET
under a picture of me retching up the whole of the night before.

“Flu,” the coach said to my mother and Doris, delivering me into their hands, but just half an hour before we arrived, she had persuaded me to try the only cure she knew, a little hair of the dog; and, as Doris held my protesting head fifteen minutes after I got home, she said, “Flu, my foot. You’re drunk.” I was too busy proving it to deny it.

Then she sat on the bed, wiping my face with a cool wash cloth, smiling and shaking her head, talking to me. “So, okay, how long has this been going on?” She didn’t expect any answer, and she didn’t get one, but she had a captive audience and enjoyed it, imagining both my fears and my sins in exaggerated generalities which were, nevertheless, alarmingly accurate. I have never told Doris anything. She always tells me what I’m up to. And, if she’s troubled by her imagination, she never admits it.

But you weren’t aware of Doris at all, except as she was one of the authorities to be placated with childish good manners. You stood when she came into the room with the memory of a curtsy stammering in your knees, made any request with an apologetic preface, answered any direct question as if you had been called on to recite. Frank suffered from your behavior even more than Doris. In your hands his good manners turned into willful attacks on your independence. He found himself at the brink of a real argument over carrying your suitcase. You would not go through a door before him, a problem he finally solved by forceably taking your arm and escorting you through. His tactful compliments were received with such surprise and suspicion that he gradually gave up any attempt to talk with you. Then he felt rude in his own house, uneasy. If you had been twelve, he would have known what to do. He would perhaps have taken on your instruction as he had his own daughter’s, and to some extent mine. But you were twenty and now so close to being a woman that it was impossible to treat you like the child you also were.