Clark said, ‘I don’t mind going, Mom, but that’s a little store and the old guy that runs it is a grouch and when you come in again,’ Clark began to giggle, ‘he looks at you like you’re crazy!’
Norm croaked, his voice still breaking, ‘Yeah! Three times in one day!’
She laughed and forgot her sermon. They weren’t lazy, they were embarrassed. She lifted her chin and pretended to grande-dame-ism. ‘Tell them your mother is eccentric.’
The boys laughed and went off together.
Ben came at five thirty with a bottle of wine, and she kissed him in front of her sons. Iso came in smiling and cornered the boys with talk of baseball, and a bet. Val came alone: Chris was having dinner with Bart’s ‘aunt,’ and Tad was visiting his parents for a few days. She challenged Ben immediately on some political issue, and Mira grinned over the stove as they argued. It was not the American Dream: it was much freer, much wilder.
She was proud of her dinner. They had a fine Brie, and good black olives with their drinks; then minestrone; then veau poêlé and brown rice and asparagus and a salad of spinach, avocado, and mushrooms with blue cheese dressing; then chilled grapes and melon. The meal went splendidly, and after dinner, the boys accepted the chore of dishes without balking. She went into the living room with Val and Iso and Ben and the remains of the wine, feeling warm and filled and content, and tried, in the back of her mind, to figure out what it was, content. And what it had to do with the American Dream. But her mind was too limpid with pleasure to work sharply. They talked; in time the boys joined them. They did not speak, but they did not yawn. They did not excuse themselves to go watch television. Of course, Iso kept getting them involved, asking them questions about their favorite television programs, their favorite sports, what kinds of clothes they liked. But the conversation kept moving away from the inarticulate boys. Still they sat there unblinking, unblinking through subsume and recidivism and revisionist and cunt and ass and motherfucker. Mira felt the evening had been some sort of triumph.
Val and Iso left before two: the boys were still sitting with them. After they left, Ben looked at her liquid-eyed. He was making no demands, but she felt herself demanding. She turned to her sons: ‘Boys, I’m going to kick you out of the bedroom tonight. One of you can sleep on the couch, one in a sleeping bag. You can toss a coin. You’re camping out tonight, okay?’
They agreed easily. She helped them make their beds, Ben carried the TV set into the living room. They made drinks and went together into the bedroom and closed the door. They sprawled out across the bed, their drinks and an ashtray between them, and talked. The boys knocked a couple of times. Norm had forgotten his pajama bottom. Clark wanted his book. They wanted to know if it was okay to eat the leftover minestrone. Each time, they opened the door shyly, but with curiosity. Each time, Ben and Mira talked to them easily, desultorily. Once they were holding hands when Clark came in: and they went on holding hands while they talked to him. And the boys stood there looking down at their mother with her lover lying on the bed, looked, and did not blink. Mira wondered at the inexpressiveness of young faces. What were they feeling, if they were feeling anything?
Eventually lights went out in the apartment, silence fell. Then Mira tried to tell Ben about her experience that day, about her confusion about the American Dream. But he did not understand. No matter how she phrased it, he simply did not know what she was talking about. Besides, he was not very interested. He felt ardent, he kept tugging at her blouse; she wanted to go on talking. In time, she gave in, but she did not give in. Whether because he did not understand the profundity of her experience that day, or because of the presence of the boys, she felt a little isolated, apart from him. Their lovemaking that night was brief and quiet. She was grateful when Ben lay back and fell asleep.
6
When the boys were gone, and they were alone, Mira told Val about that day. Val understood immediately. ‘It’s that you can, for a moment, believe in enduring happiness.’
‘Yes. And you think if you clutch it – whatever it is – you can, well, stop time, freeze the moment, preserve the joy.’
‘But that’s true of every happiness, not just this one.’
‘Yes. But part of what brought me up short was that I was afraid of falling into the impulse toward permanence. But I was also shocked at how I was still buying the package, the happy humming domesticity, you know?’ she cooed the phrase.
‘But it was, wasn’t it?’
‘Val, we had so much fun that afternoon, the boys and I. We laughed, we sang …’ She gazed wide-eyed at her friend. ‘The vegetables smelled so fine and fresh, the sun was so bright! But I don’t like to cook!’ she insisted.
Valerie laughed. ‘It’s like me never really learning to type. I type all the time, of course, but even after all these years, I’m lousy at it. I didn’t want to be excellent at something I was supposed to be able to do.’
‘Oh,’ Mira mock-moaned, ‘nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you’re trying to escape?’
They both laughed hopelessly.
‘You’re closer to the boys, aren’t you?’
‘Much. But still – I don’t know. I worry. I still have such trepidations, Val. Guilt, I guess, but I can’t seem to eradicate it. I do still feel it’s shocking to have Ben here with them. And they – well, I don’t know – they never mention him, they’re noncommittal when I ask them what they think of him. And when we’re all together, they tease him – but, well, there’s a little – well – an edge to it …’
‘Hostility.’
Mira nodded.
‘That’s inevitable, you know? Strangeness, jealousy: he’s an intruder in their house, in their lives. It’s good they can let it out with a casing of good humor.’
Mira sighed. ‘Of course. Why do I always panic if people aren’t getting along perfectly? The least discord throws me for a loop, I start to think I’m doing something wrong, that I have to do something to eliminate it.’
‘Now that’s really the American Dream, female version.’
‘Complete harmony, all the time. Oh, God, why don’t I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul? You know,’ a smile crept around the edges of Mira’s mouth, ‘late last night, the phone rang. It was Clark. He wanted to ask me what courses he should sign up for next semester. He’d been with me for two weeks and said practically nothing, but last night he talked for two hours. Collect, of course.’
‘Ooooooh!’ Val laid her head in her hand. ‘Ooooooh!’
Chris was leaving for college in a week, and Val, independent, antifamily Val, was in a moderate panic. She and Chris had been alone together for fifteen years, now that was ending.
Iso, sensing Val’s anxiety, and imagining that Chris might feel anxious about leaving her mother and going off alone to Chicago, got the women together and planned a celebration. They piled into two cars and drove Chris to Logan – Val and Chris and Tad and Mira and Ben and Clarissa and Duke and Kyla (Harley couldn’t come) and Bart. Following Iso’s directions, they all dressed in costumes and carried signs and blowers and horns. Chris was pink with embarrassment and pleasure as they walked into the terminal.
They followed Chris on the round of ticket and baggage check, seat reservation. They were a group of oddments behaving oddly, who were nevertheless together. They stood outside the low railing surrounding the seats for customers (there were no barriers in those days, no bomb or gun checks) until the word came to queue up for boarding. Chris kissed them all, kissed and held her mother, then hurried to a place in line. Then they all hooted and hollered, whistled, cheered, blew blowers, waved signs.
Kyla was wearing her old cheerleader outfit; she kept jumping in the air and shouting, ‘Yay, yay, who’s okay? Chris, Chris, Chri-i-i-s!’ Clarissa, in tight woolen pants and Indian blanket and headband, smiled enigmatically and waved a sign: ‘Oh, Chicago, here Chris comes!’ and occasionally blew the party blower she had locked between her
teeth. Bart was done up from head to foot in shiny white leather; he too blew and while he was blowing, held his arms, clasped together in a victory sign above his head. Duke wore a sheet and a helmet like a Norse god’s, and carried a trident and a sign: ‘To Valhalla with you.’ Tad seemed to be losing his costume, a sheet that was a cross between a toga and a loincloth. He looked bewildered, but occasionally tooted on his tin horn. Iso, in a sequinned jumpsuit and an aviator’s cap pushed back on her head, waved a sign, blew a blower, whistled, yelled; and every once in a while adjusted Val’s feather boa, which kept slipping down off her shoulders. Iso was the director, and waved her hand in command, urging crescendi as the line of passengers grew shorter. At the end they all shouted and blew and tooted and waved at once, they cried, ‘Yay, Chris!’ and Chris stood, looking at them, for once in clean blue jeans and a neat top and her hair combed, looking fifteen, and she tried to smile but her mouth trembled and she turned her head swiftly away and disappeared.
‘Oh, my God, she’s gone!’ Val cried, and the group formed around her and embraced her and led her away and loaded themselves back into cars and drove back to her house and had a party that lasted until two in the morning.
My sister has a life like this. She lives in a small community; it has the usual discords, but when one of her friends is in trouble, the others gather round and lift up the hurt one, bandage her in love. They do little homely things that can’t save, but salve. Probably everywhere there are little groups like that, groups whose order isn’t legislated, can’t be codified; they’re flexible and shifting, people leave, people arrive, people die, but the group goes on, ruled by spirit, not codes, adapting to what happens.
My friends in Cambridge were like this, and more than anyone, it was Iso who taught us this kind of love. Her grandmother, whom she loved more than her own parents, had lived with her family all through Iso’s childhood. She was a vivid, intelligent woman who always had time enough to play, imagination enough to pretend, and mind enough to speak the truth, even to a child. But through all those years, Lamia Keith had been ill with several diseases; that she was dying was certain. Yet she was always celebrating something, baking a cake, festooning the living room with crepe paper ribbons because she’d seen some frost on the grass, or the first fruit on the lemon tree in the front of the house. She bought horns and blowers and little gifts for every holiday from St Patrick’s to Columbus Day. Clarissa Dalloway said, ‘Here’s death – in the middle of my party.’ Lamia Keith said, ‘Here’s a party! in the middle of my dying.’ And Iso remembered.
The celebration at the airport gave them all ideas. Everyone planned parties. The problem was saving up enough money, and finding good dates to give them. They had plenty of ideas: come as your favorite fantasy figure; come as your favorite fictional character; come dressed as your favorite author and act out his/her personality all night.
The surroundings were sometimes shabby and the refreshments sparse, but the parties were brilliant. They played games: three or four members of a team would be assigned a plot and told to act it out in the styles of various authors. Val, Grete, and Brad were told to act out a husband’s discovery of his wife’s infidelity in the style of Henry James, Tennessee Williams, and Dostoevsky. Val was assigned the husband’s role because she was tallest. Iso, Kyla, and Duke had to act out the same subject in the style of Fielding, Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer, but Duke reneged, and Clarissa took his place. They would gather at Iso’s, who had a great collection of old records, and all get down on the floor on one knee and sing ‘Swanee’ with Al Jolson, or moan ‘The Man That Got Away’ with Judy Garland. Couples would dance like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to the music of the thirties and forties, and Iso perfected a dance in which she leaped up on the sofa cushions, stepped on its top, pushing it over, and leaped off and pirouette-tapped away. They came with canes and top hats and other strange equipment gathered from junk piles and attics. Ben and Tad perfected a sketch that was a takeoff on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; Grete and Avery acted out a love scene in the styles of French, Italian, British, and American movies. They lined up and danced the soft-shoe, or pretended to be the Rockettes. They made up poems, line by line, going around the room; they thought up plots for pornographic novels they never wrote, or for detective stories they planned to write.
The crowd attending the parties fluctuated, but at its center always were Iso, Clarissa, and Kyla, Mira and Ben, Val and Tad. Duke came when he was home, but he did not participate happily; Harley never came, although sometimes he would stop by late in the evening to pick Kyla up. Grete and Avery, who had become lovers, often came and acted out roles and played games with real gusto: Grete, especially, was a marvelous performer. But central to all the parties was Iso. It was from her the creative impulse came, and in a subliminal way, she dominated the gatherings. She’d grown very tanned over the summer, and her hair had lightened in the sun. Tall and tanned and slender, just like a song, her pale green eyes brilliant in the tan taut face, her hair floating around her shoulders, she moved through rooms like a visitation. Everyone stopped to turn to her, she was a magnet.
Iso’s seeing always the positive side of people was not an affectation: it came out of her sense of herself and her own life. She had been tight and frightened, she had decided to risk, and here she was, doing work she loved, surrounded by friends who accepted her. She glowed with satisfaction, she believed in possibilities. And everyone in the circle was in some way in love with her. All faces lighted up – even Harley’s – when she walked in. It was not just her beauty or her charming manner; she was fascinating because she was undefinable. People felt that they could never really know her, never fully pin her down.
Even Mira, who knew her well, felt that. She and Iso spent many evenings together talking; Iso tried to give Mira some sense of her life.
‘I don’t know when I first knew I was different – maybe always. Yet at the same time, I didn’t know I was different. How can I explain that? Like, some kids have brown eyes, and some blue. You may realize you’re the only kid in the neighborhood with green eyes, but that fact has no significance. You don’t think of it as a difference. Like one kid can run faster, another throws better, somebody is terrific on a skate board – you know – and those things make them special, but not different. It is not the difference but the significance placed on that difference that is important. I knew how I felt about girls, knew it early, but I assumed everybody else felt the same way. I assumed I’d get married and have children, just like my mother, like my aunts.
‘But someplace along the line I became aware that my feeling about girls wasn’t shared by other females. And I discovered that my feeling, my difference, had a name, that it was a nasty name, that the way I was was considered wicked, depraved, sick. That shook me up. That was when I started to withdraw, to watch myself carefully, to dress and act so as not to draw attention to myself, hoping my depraved deviation wouldn’t show. It did, though, you know. It showed to other women who were like me. I can’t tell you how many of them tried to make friends with me in college. I was terrified by it, I pulled away from them in a cruel way. I didn’t want to be what I was.
‘I thought maybe I could make it go away. I began to accept dates, I necked in cars, I allowed myself – rather coldly and calculatingly as I recall – to be seduced. Finally, I got engaged. My parents were ecstatic: they must have sensed something was wrong with me. I was engaged to a very handsome guy, a law student at the University of California. He was a gentle fellow, a little bland and uninteresting, but a great sailor, and he had a boat. We went out on it every weekend. That made up for everything else. I thought I could hack marriage to him. I don’t know what I was thinking – that marriage was a lot of sailing weekends, I guess. I hated screwing but I didn’t let myself think about that. He was not pushy, and I kept him off me most of the time. When I did give in, I was very drunk.
‘One night he came over to my place late at night, unexpectedly. I was studying. I
had an exam in economics the next day, not my strong suit as you might guess,’ she grinned. Iso’s improvidence was famous. ‘He was out of his mind drunk – he’d been out with a bunch of guys, macho guys, I imagine, who’d been talking about “broads” and screwing all night. He’d gotten worked up about my dislike for sex, and he’d come over to, as he put it, have his rights. Another night I might have given in just to shut him up and get rid of him. But this night I wouldn’t. I was outraged. I had this eco exam. I had to study, it wasn’t a question of working for an A, it was a question of not failing. But that didn’t mean anything to him. He was ugly and he stunk of liquor and vomit. He pushed me around the room, he smacked me. I hit him back, tried to push him, but he had eighty pounds on me. In the end he raped me. That’s what it was, although it would never stand up in court. Rape is the right of husbands and lovers.
‘When he was finished, he passed out, and I went back and studied, but I couldn’t concentrate. I was so outraged my pulse was pounding, my head was full of booming blood, I couldn’t think. Next morning I went to take my exam. When I got back, he was sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee. I just looked at him, but he didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong. He laughed and groaned and held his head; he talked about getting “smashed” as if he’d done something cute and funny. I asked him if he remembered what he’d done. He put on a small boy apologetic face and said he knew he’d pushed me. Pushed me. But then he laughed, he looked delighted with himself: “You don’t have the hottest pants in town, you know,” he said. That justified everything.
‘I stood there very slowly taking off my engagement ring – it was a little diamond, can you imagine me with something like that? – and I walked into the bathroom. He got up, he was puzzled. I stood there over the john waiting for him to come to the doorway. Then I dropped the ring in and flushed the john. He tried to stop me, but I was too fast. He stood there yelling, he couldn’t believe what had happened. By the time he came to himself and came after me. I had the phone off the hook. “You lay one hand on me and I’ll press charges,” I said. “For assault and rape. That will look nice on your record when you come up to the bar.” He stood there furious. He called me every name in the book. He was figuring his chances. He really wanted to beat me up. But then I felt the same way: I’d have liked to kill him. He saw that. Eventually he left.
The Women's Room Page 50
