In Her Day

by Rita Mae Brown

  How incongruous that they should be in here and after such a night. But then Adele believed in the sovereignty of the incongruous. Checking her watch hidden under her sleeve, she whispered to Carole that it was time to pick up Ilse from Mother Courage.

  As they pulled up in front of the restaurant Ilse was in the doorway shouting at a persistent man. They rolled down the windows and the fragrance of cheap wine hit them in the face. He couldn’t walk too well either. There he stood lurching in the doorway while Jill Ward, in a purple undershirt that displayed well-developed arms, quietly moved over to back up Ilse. Two angry faces were too much for him but he managed to garble at full volume as he stumbled off, “Juss what do you women want, anyway?”

  “Colorado,” Ilse barked. She noticed the car as he staggered away.

  Adele called out, “Greetings, salutations, and all other forms of hello. Get in, we’ll take you both home.”

  Jill, laughing, with her hands on her hips, answered, “No thanks. I’m waiting for Dolores to pick me up.”

  Ilse, amazed, came over to the car and looked at Carole.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Adele’s surprise. Surprised? We’ve been off tilting windmills. Come on.”

  “I can’t be seen riding in this thing.”

  “Then lie on the floor,” Adele told her flatly.

  Reluctantly Ilse climbed in and hunched on the floor. Not much was said on the way home. Carole embraced Adele and LaVerne as she and Ilse arrived at the well-kept brownstone apartment building.

  “Thank you for the unexpected.”

  “My pleasure.” Adele kissed her.

  As they drove off LaVerne said, “Looks like a fight.”

  “Yep.”

  Adele pulled her favorite wing chair over to the glass doors in front of the garden. She often liked to sit up late reading, writing, or puzzling in the rare silence of the night. LaVerne woke up each day at seven whether she had to go to work or not. They adjusted over-time to each others internal time clock. Adele would wake up somewhere between ten and eleven and, if it was Saturday or Sunday, LaVerne greeted her with a hot cup of tea as she padded out of the bathroom.

  Adele thought, it’s the little things that keep you together. My mother told me that when I used to ask her how she got along with Daddy. I didn’t listen to Mother. Well, I always was a smartass. What was my rallying cry at T.J. High? ‘Yeast in the drain traps. Cherry bomb the toilets.’ Smartass. Should of listened to Mom—would have saved me the heartbreak of my divorce. Funny word, but papers or no papers, divorce is the same. LaVerne taught me the small kindnesses of everyday life that gradually overwhelm a grandiose act of generosity. The tea in the morning, paying attention to my clothes, fussing over me if I put on a pound. Sometimes I think I don’t do as much for Verne as she does for me. I forget sometimes. I do take her out to dinner once a week at least, and movies whenever there’s one we like. I massage her feet when she’s had a hard day. I wonder how I lived before LaVerne? I can’t even remember. Seems like some dim, uncertain fog. She taught me that each day is the only day. I must find beauty in the day, correct a wrong if I can, fulfill my obligations to my friends, my people, even my country. I can never treat a day as cheap or expect there will be another one. LaVerne calls me “the brain” but she’s the one who taught me what’s most important to know. Carole has that but doesn’t transmit it. No, that’s not fair. I’ve never lived with her or perhaps I’d have picked it up. LaVerne’s background isn’t all that far from Carole’s, a little higher up with money. Maybe that knowledge, that gift is something all poor or near-poor people have: the ability to savor the moment, to laugh out loud.

  Mom gave me good advice but for a long time I couldn’t listen. Their battle for whiteness, for respectability is almost heroic if it weren’t so sad. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t listen. There they are sitting in St. Louis in that goddamned mansion on that private street. Every two years without fail, Dad buys a Cadillac. To this day I can’t look at a Cadillac without embarrassment. How vulgar. Couldn’t he buy something less gigantic, less Midwestern? And every two years he buys Mother what he calls “a little runabout for my sugar,” usually a small-model Buick. Even the runabout can’t fall into the low-priced three. There they sit surrounded by color televisions in the upstairs and downstairs, a small black and white one in the bathroom, electric can openers, electric carving knives, electric face moisturizers, hot combs, blenders, automatic ice crushers. If it’s new and it’s got a button they buy it. And Daddy’s expensive golf clubs. Mom’s a golf widow. She retaliated by taking up tennis. And what astounds me, what knocks me out is that they’re happy. Or maybe they only think they’re happy. Don’t they know they’re supposed to be miserable? I feel waste amid all the appliances. I have yet to meet two more perversely cheerful people. They’ve made it. They sit among all the things that prove they’ve won. I don’t think they’ve won but they do. I guess that’s what’s important. The crowning blow is they’re Republicans. The next thing I know they’ll throw a sit-down dinner for two hundred: tents and music to honor Sammy Davis, Jr. Well, I guess I’m the snob. They didn’t teach me what I wanted to learn but they gave me my chance. I wouldn’t be where I am now if they hadn’t wanted me to make something out of myself. To go farther than they did. They worship money and I turned to the lost beauties of another time. Verne’s right, I don’t give them enough credit. I developed my so-called refined sensibility even if in reaction because of them. Who the hell am I to sit in judgment of my parents, anyway? Dad buys a Cadillac and I rent a Rolls. How’d I get on this jag?

  Is that what fascinates me about the Mayas? We see exquisite temples but how did they feel about their parents? Did a woman bring her friend a drink in the morning? I never felt how pressing was the presence of the dead until I went up eighty-four hundred feet and saw Machu Picchu. There wrapped in clouds sat the fortress city guarded by the Andes standing like sentinels. What a sight! Up to that time my work was the usual blend of curiosity stiffened by pedantry. But after that I was humbled before our ancestors. They’re all our ancestors. And the Mayas were the Inca’s ancestors prefiguring Machu Picchu. I know it’s a cliche but I can’t help falling back on it: we’re a human chain. The dead give to the living and the living must give to each other and we must secure the future for the unborn. The thought comforts me. If I get torn apart in my own time or confused, I at least know I have my place in time. I’m part of this chain. We have a few scraps of Mayan thought. I think the most beautiful is, “Life is a conversation between all living things.” I amend that for myself to include those who went before me and those who come after. Perhaps I was drawn to study these people to learn this. I’m not sure I could have learned it if I remained bound to my own century. I’m an incredibly lucky woman.

  She got up with tears in her eyes and tiptoed to the bedroom so she wouldn’t wake up LaVerne.

  “A Rolls Royce!”

  “Ilse, I had nothing to do with it but if I had I wouldn’t be ashamed of it.”

  “For chrissake, a Rolls is the symbol of class oppression. I can’t believe you ignore things like that.”

  “A symbol doesn’t equal oppression. My riding in a Rolls Royce doesn’t make me one of the four hundred.”

  “Just because you’re not one of them doesn’t mean you don’t identify with them. Don’t you know that’s the secret of American control? The rich get the nonrich to identify with them.”

  “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

  “No, I’m not. The symbols of the rich have no place in my life. I don’t identify with rich people and I don’t want other people to identify with them or to lump me with them either. Gucci or Rolls or whatever, it’s all the same to me: disgusting. How can I ride around in a car like that or wear Tiffany earrings? I can’t believe you can’t see it.”

  “I don’t give a damn what other people think.”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re above all that. Above the struggle
and beside the point.”

  “Oh, come on now. This is all out of proportion to the incident. I ride in a fancy car one night and you’ve got me owning all of South America.”

  “It’s not trivial. Don’t act so consciously reasonable. That infuriates me almost as much as you riding around in that damn car. It’s patronizing. I’m trying to make you understand that you can’t take these things for granted. It’s a new time. People who ride in big cars are objects of hate these days in a way they never were before. Well, I don’t know about the Depression, I mean how people were emotionally. But from what I can see these things like cars and alligator shoes are no longer neutral things. What you do affects other people in a way you don’t seem to understand.”

  “One night in that ludicrous car is hardly going to affect anyone, except you.”

  “Well, I’m important. But you’re trying to trivialize again. More people than myself saw you in that car.”

  “Ilse …”

  “Let me finish. What did Jill Ward think? I can just see this dumb story circulating all through the movement.”

  “If your getting in the car is so gossip worthy then the movement sounds to me like a disguised kaffee-klatch.”

  Ilse paused and sighed. “Unfortunately, sometimes it leans in that direction. I console myself with the fact that gossip seems to oil the machinery of any political group whether it’s on the Hill or us. Not much consolation though. I guess I want people to act like they should instead of how they do.”

  Carole turned on the stereo and Bobby Short sang “So Near Yet So Far.”

  “Look, I’ve told you a thousand times, I don’t give a damn what other people think. I want to live my life as I see fit.”

  “And I keep telling you that you confuse individualism with independence.”

  “Whenever you get on my case I have the distinct impression you want us all in uniform. Hell, I’m beginning to think individuality went out with the French Revolution.”

  “Jesus, what are you, campaigning for reactionary of the year?”

  “I don’t know. I want out of the shadow of the guillotine.”

  “Very cute. And I’m not suggesting we all wear uniforms although it’d give me a certain thrill to see Seventh Avenue fall to pieces. I’m saying we have to have some communality. And we have to have discipline. That’s not the same as saying everyone has to look alike, act alike, think alike. Without community and discipline we’ll stay ineffective fragments or worse, we’ll be obliterated.”

  “I’m not a political person. All I want is to be left alone to do my work.”

  “You damn sight better become a political person. Things are so bad no one can afford to sit on the sidelines.”

  “Ilse, I’ve had about enough of this. Now this is my last word on the subject. First of all, there are no organizations which represent my interests. Nobody wants their queers. Not Blacks, whites, rich, poor, women or men. We’re outcasts. So you’ve organized lesbians. Fine and good except they’re all under thirty. At least all the ones I’ve seen are young. If they’re not under thirty then they’re as downwardly mobile as the postwar generation was upwardly mobile. I’m not going to trade in my Ph. D. for a workshirt and tie-dye jeans. I’m forty-four years old. My interests are different. So you all may be doing something useful. I mean, I know you’re doing something useful but it’s not anything I can participate in. And even if there were a group close to my interests, I might give money but I don’t know if I’d give time. I’m not a joiner. I don’t like being subject to human limitation and when you’ve thrown in your lot with a group that’s exactly what happens. You move at the pace of the slowest instead of the fastest. I’ve got this one fragile life and I have to fight enough things without spending the next three years explaining policy to someone who can’t or doesn’t want to understand it.”

  “Our entire society’s falling apart. I can’t understand that you don’t give a shit.”

  “Society isn’t falling apart. It never was together.”

  “You’re impossible!” Ilse stormed out and slammed the door.

  Louisa May rushed to the door but she was late. Carole picked the cat up and kissed her forehead. The buzzer rang.

  “It’s me. I forgot my bag.”

  Ilse ran up the stairs and Carole handed the gas mask bag to her. She said, “Thank you,” and looked as though she wanted to say more, then gave up on it. Carole quietly closed the door as Ilse walked back down the carpeted stairs. She resisted the impulse to open the street side windows and watch Ilse disappear in the direction of Park Avenue.

  Well, it had to happen, she thought to herself. We were two right people who met at the wrong time, that’s all. Or maybe we were two right people who were born at the wrong times. It isn’t that I disavow her cause. I can’t make the same choice she’s made. I don’t know. She allows for no compromises. Surely, there’s such a thing as an honest compromise of thought. Maybe that’s her years. The young are notoriously intolerant although it’s the old that are blamed for it. She doesn’t seem to understand or care that there’s a difference between ideology and the truth. Well, her logic is compelling even if it isn’t always based on reality. No, that’s not fair. I’m not being fair at all. Much of what she says is true. But she jumps off from simple discrimination into an interlocking system of sexism, racism, capitalism, and god knows what else. Maybe it’s all connected but right now I find much of her thinking impermissibly vague. Maybe it’s me. But I can’t take her say-so on faith. If all these things are connected then I need to see those connections. That’s not too much to ask. Any thinking person who isn’t overly political would ask the same question. Just because a woman says something doesn’t mean I’m bound to believe her. I want proof. I’m a rational being. Head before heart. Thank god. If there’s one thing I despise it’s irrationality. That’s really what’s wrong between Ilse and me. She says the same thing over and over again thinking repetition will substitute for proof. Dammit, I’m not taking anything on faith. And I know the women’s movement is young and Ilse is young but they’d both better do their intellectual homework.

  Fortified by what she thought was the compelling purity of her own logic, Carole set about straightening up her desk, ignoring the loneliness creeping up on her. Bobby Short’s records were followed by Cris Williamson. The sound of a woman’s voice filling the background increased her loneliness although she was unaware of it.

  She marched into her bedroom followed by the two fat cats. Turning down the covers she noticed a pale yellow pubic hair on the white sheet, a reminder of lovemaking past. Christ, how can anyone get sentimental over a pubic hair? She picked it up and went into the bathroom where she threw it in the wastebasket. She washed her face and hands. Dried them and looked into her small three-way mirror as she put on her night cream. She paused, momentarily captured by her own image.

  How delicious. Am I going to sit here and gaze at my forty-four-year-old face in an orgy of concern over my ageing equipment? Trite, trite and boring, the confrontation of woman with mirror. How many movies have I seen where the once great beauty goes into a fit looking at herself? For some reason a woman contemplating her face is the equivalent of a man frothing at the mouth about the state of the universe and his own soul. I don’t even think Katharine Hepburn pulled it off in “The Lion in Winter.”

  Yet for all her sarcasm she stayed with the smooth reflection. It wasn’t vanity holding her there. A fear gripped her. She feared looking into her own eyes but, prompted by hidden voices, she slowly raised her head full upright and raised her eyes into her own stare. Silence. The pupil widened as though a stone had been thrown in the middle of her blackness. The ripples raced to the unseen. The self retreated under such scrutiny. But what retreat was there in a three-way mirror revealing an infinite regress of self? She couldn’t see the end of her image. She no longer knew what she believed at this moment. And if she no longer knew, who was that in the mirror?

  A bag of bones. Ye
s, a bag of bones. She congratulated herself on her own humor in the loss of self. Or was she so full of self that there was no self? Had she circled and circled her perimeter until she diminished to zero? The joke was short lived and the reflection grew tears. If she no longer knew what she believed or even if she had a self she could still feel. The reverberation of a heartbeat threatened to break her entire delicate structure. Her eyes left the engulfing pupil and followed a tear as it splintered around the corners of her mouth.

  Here I am slipping into self doubt. I rarely allow myself to cry. I always wonder am I indulging myself in some exotic melancholy or is it weakness? I’ve always detested tears. How I wanted to strangle Mother when she’d break into those huge, titanic sobs that would shake the house. Tears are traitors. They rob me of my strength. If I hold them back I can hold together. And here I am bawling. I can stand the pain. I just can’t stand to see it. God, if only I could go back where I came from. Then I could haul off and belt Luke or Margaret, steal one of their bicycles, and ride until I couldn’t pedal anymore. The exhaustion purged me of whatever pain or hatred there was. That’s all gone now. I lost it somewhere between eighth grade and ninth, between grade school and high school. The world was lusty red and thunderous black. You knew where you stood. You knew how to fight back or lie and then go do it again. Sweet Jesus, how far have I wandered from my roots that I could be muffled like this? How much have I pushed back, choked, smoothed over in order to win? And I haven’t even won. I shouldn’t quibble with Ilse. For all the petty disagreements, the real reason I fought her was because I don’t want to look at the span of years between eighth grade and now. I want myself back. I want to knock the shit out of someone I don’t like. I want to play kick the can at twilight. I want to laugh without knowing it’s going to stop. I’m so tired. I’m so tired of the people around me, except for Adele. I don’t want to explain anything to anyone. I don’t need a reason. I didn’t need a reason when I was a kid. Chocolate ice cream tasted good. Who cared about calories? We knew each other then. If I looked in a mirror it was to wash my face.