Perhaps she was wrong to turn away from God and look to something else for comfort. God was inside her. Or perhaps He was the spark outside her, the charge that came from a connection with another person, with nature. She had not felt that surge of connection—to anyone or anything—in ages. It had always been Benjamin. Even the women with whom she had gathered, who sat together in a tight circle and challenged conventional gender roles. She had wanted to feel securely fastened to them, but they were all unhooking themselves from the past, and despite a certain shared history, they were making their ways alone. Sitting in the Marriott looking for salvation might not be useful, it could also be just plain wrong.
Sharon thought of Vanessa emerging from the bathroom yesterday, her face red, her features unreachable and also hard, despite her swollen eyes and cheeks. That is not my daughter’s face. My daughter’s face is sweet and open; it smiles. I recognize it. My daughter is that girl drawing at her desk, flicking eraser crumbs off her work. My daughter is that yearbook photo from last year taped to the fridge; that is the real color of her hair, that is her true smile, her freckles. I have made the best choices available to me and I choose now to love her. I will not look at this as how it should have turned out between us. How Vanessa should have turned out. I have tried to live my life authentically.
Sharon lifted her head and, palm to her cheek, brushed off the bread crumbs. She remembered Vanessa standing on the lip of the lake at Monticello throwing crusts of bread to the ducks. But her profile was frozen—did she remember the event or was it only the photograph she saw? Why won’t my memory move? Sharon thought. Vanessa wearing Sharon’s enormous sunglasses by the woodpile in the backyard. She cleared her throat and straightened herself up, and steeling herself for the long night ahead, she went to put the cutting board, littered with potato eyes and flecks of parsley and garlic skin, in the sink for the housekeeper to wash with all the other dishes. I have made a choice, she thought of her daughter, a black cloud in a vintage dress. And now I have chosen to love you.
Elias Sanders, she knew, had also been her choice. Whether it was LEAP! that led her to him or he who led her to LEAP! she couldn’t say. Sharon sat next to him at her third session, at the end of November, just after Thanksgiving. Dennis’s parents had come, and for the first time Benjamin—who now insisted on being called Benji, which sounded to Sharon like the name of a sheepdog—was back home. That part had been lovely, but it hadn’t lessened the stress, never mind the work she did for the dinner. An old friend from Los Angeles had sent her an article about Mexican Americans brining their turkeys, and this year Sharon had tried the technique. She had brined that turkey for days, bathing it with the kind of care saved for infants. Even as she held the bird, carefully lifting it from the brining pail, and turning it, rubbing its taut back and breast, she knew it was ludicrous. Then, in part because she had become so interested in Richard Olney’s ideas about seasonal cooking, she made her usual trip to the Harley farm way out in Maryland for her root vegetables, then another trip out to the dairy for the whole milk and Gruyère she would use for the gratin, instead of the traditional mashed potatoes.
Had anyone offered to join her for the drive? Did anyone care? Briefly, the meal made everyone but Vanessa, who ate next to nothing, happy. Even Tatti, whose only non-Russian fare consisted of hot dogs, bran muffins, and her awful meringues, gobbled up the turkey and creamed spinach, scraping her plate with the side of her fork. But in the end, when the actual eating was over and done, Dennis still got incredibly wound up around his father, and Ben’s new interest—more obsession—with Sigmund’s past made Dennis even more clenched. Every time Ben asked his grandfather a question about union building, or what it was like to be a part of socialism when it was real, or why he’d turned against the communists in the end, the muscles on Dennis’s neck bulged. As soon as Sigmund started to answer—union building was the most important thing he’d done; socialism is still very real, just look at France; I was more against totalitarianism than communism, but this is complicated—Dennis would make a noisy production of getting up to clear the table or change the music.
“What you need to understand, Benjamin, is that Stalinism was totally new to us,” Sigmund droned on and on. “While it was happening, it was confusing. But communism and socialism are not the same thing. In fact, they were often in direct conflict with each other.”
Dennis had gone to change the music and had put in one of Vanessa’s tapes, “by accident.” Instead of going back to turn it off, he came into the living room laughing. Of course, the effect of the screaming guitars was to completely drown out his father, if only for a moment. Still Sharon could not shake Sigmund’s sad face tilting up to Dennis with such hurt and befuddlement.
Sharon found herself seated next to Elias on the Monday after Thanksgiving. He wore jeans and a wrinkled dress shirt, untucked, and he smelled of saddle soap. His eyes were electric blue, the whites of his eyes extreme against his tanned skin.
During a morning coffee break, as people stood outside smoking, shifting their feet to stay warm, Sharon and Elias stood among many in the lobby munching on bananas and soft pretzels.
He introduced himself to Sharon and she held out her hand.
Instead, Elias hugged her. “I’ve been wanting to do that all morning,” he said.
Sharon’s hands remained inert at her sides. It was all she could do to lift her shoulders in response.
“I’ve just come back from Africa, from Gabon. I was volunteering for UNICEF.” His hands slid down her arms, toward her hands.
Sharon nodded. “How interesting,” she said, shaking him off. She thought of the embassy party that had made her cooking locally famous.
“Can you believe I was a banker? Not too long ago, but I gave it all up.” He scratched his chin through his beard.
“That’s wonderful. So what brings you here?”
“I sold everything but my guitar.” Elias’s teeth were so white against his beard and his skin. “Don’t even have a watch. I wanted to live an authentic life. I’ve looked into many things. Buddhism. Hinduism. EST. This will be only one of many things I will use to make my way, I think.”
“To make your way?”
“Yes,” he said. “Make my way through my life. Through the world.”
“So you’re not buying this?” Sharon imagined running her finger around the rim of a wineglass, wishing she had something to do with her hands.
“Well, I am paying, if that’s what you mean, Sharon.” He tipped his head back and laughed.
Sharon laughed. He was lean and she could imagine him in some dry field digging ditches, and just from the way he looked at her there was no debate in her mind: if this man who had given up his worldly possessions, who wore a leather band strung with one yellow African bead around his neck, and whose ass looked pretty damn good in faded Levi’s, made a pass at her, she would accept it. A new decade, after all, was about to begin.
When they were all called back into the conference via bullhorn, Elias reached out and finally caught hold of Sharon’s hand.
They took a room in the Marriott Hotel, along East-West Highway in Silver Spring, just a few miles from where she had lived for the past thirteen years. The room was twelve floors above the conference where they had each pledged to have no relations with other LEAP!ers for thirty days in order to let the high of the tenets dissipate a bit. One needs a more solid head, the leader had said. To decide such things.
Elias opened her blouse slowly, twisting each button with his thumb and third finger, then running his finger along her breastbone. When her shirt finally fell open, he studied her, then caressed her breasts. Was he putting her on? He licked her nipples, then moved his lips slowly down her stomach, and Sharon couldn’t have cared less if he was. Elias removed her underwear, and kissing her just above her pubic bone, he slipped two fingers inside her. Sharon moved into his hands until he stopped suddenly, removing his fingers as if he’d thought better of the whole thing. While S
haron propped herself up on her elbows to see what had happened, Elias got up and opened his wallet. Was he moving to pay her? Before? Or worse—and now she thought of Midnight Cowboy, she’d been so scandalized by that film—was he expecting her to pay him? She wondered how much a man like Elias would cost.
Instead, he removed a joint from the wallet, took a lighter from his front pocket, lit it up, leaned over the bed, and passed it to Sharon, who took a deep drag. She passed it back to Elias, who, still standing, took another hit. Sharon unzipped his jeans. He wasn’t wearing underwear, and Sharon could see instantly that he had a longer, thinner penis and was far hairier than Dennis, who always felt and looked unbelievably clean. Elias smelled dusky and deep, and as she leaned in, she was surprised to discover that he was uncircumcised.
After Elias had entered her and after she wrapped herself around him as he’d made love to her, allowed herself in that single moment to be carried, Sharon stood, zipped up her slacks, slipped on her blouse, and said to Elias that since he didn’t have a house to go to, he could have the room, she was going home. But then he reached his hand out and grabbed her by a belt loop.
“Stay with me.” His mouth was at her ear. He kissed her nape. “Don’t leave,” he’d said, unzipping her pants for the second time.
Again, he stopped suddenly. “Wait here,” he said, just as he had removed her left pant leg. “I need to get something from my car.” He let his fingers graze her crotch over her underwear before getting up from the bed.
Sharon sucked in her breath and fell back into the pillow. “Sure,” she said. “Why not.” Already she imagined being one of those women, waiting and waiting, flipping through the channels using the remote, a luxury they didn’t have at home. There would be the hostage crisis, today was day number twenty-eight; how much longer could this go on? She imagined staring at the ceiling, which, as Elias had lifted her head and leaned over her, inching himself in, she had noticed had a wet stain on the yellowing stucco.
“I’m coming right back,” he said, hopping on one leg as he pulled on his jeans.
“Okay.” She wondered if he would leave her with the bill.
Sharon couldn’t help it; she rolled on her side, leaned on her elbow, and watched him dress. She liked his lithe body, covered in dark, curly hair. It didn’t really matter to her; it was absolutely for the best if he did not come back.
Elias left his wallet, she noticed, as he closed the door quietly behind him. Sharon rolled onto her stomach and kicked her legs in the air; she knocked her feet against each other and felt her crotch against the mattress, alive, its own animal, she imagined now, thinking of the first time she had been with Dennis. Because Elias was only the second man she’d had sex with unless one counted the surgeon, which would be absurd, if technically accurate. Because of course she had missed the moment when women became sexually liberated. By a hair, she had missed it. That first night with Dennis in Georgetown, after they’d gone paddle boating in the Tidal Basin, they’d gone back to her place on Q Street. The date had been only so-so; Dennis had gone on and on about architecture, the way D.C. was built. Just like Paris, he had said, sweeping his arm out as if the city had been his to show. She had not yet been to Paris, so she couldn’t yet say yes or no, and she hadn’t realized at the time that Dennis had never been either.
But her roommate had been away, and she knew they would be alone when she brought Dennis home with her late that afternoon. As he’d pointed to the cherry trees—they’d been blooming, she remembered as she waited for Elias; how prophetic, those trees bloomed for a matter of seconds—Sharon knew she would go to bed with him, just as she had known today with Elias. Dennis was teaching her about D.C., but his tone was neither bossy nor terribly preachy. And she liked the way his finger pointed at everything but her. She had desired him deeply—the blond duckling hair on his arms, his hazel eyes, his talk of making change from within the system. That’s what Washington is about, he’d said. Her mother had warned her—Don’t you ever do it before you’re married! Men need the chase, darling, what do they want with what they’ve got?—but Sharon hadn’t cared. She had, after all, been fitted for a diaphragm years before, in college, even though she had no need for it then. She had merely wanted to be the kind of girl who went to the clinic and got one.
The afternoon light had made its way through the blinds as she and Dennis began their lovemaking on the living room couch. While he banged up against her, meeting what he would later—a week later, in bed at Len Ford’s place in Skatesville, when they were able to laugh about it just a little—say felt to him like a brick wall, hardly, he’d said, the way he would have imagined popping her cherry, Sharon was in excruciating pain. As he tried at her from different angles, Sharon wondered, had her mother gotten in there and inserted a barrier, somehow just walled her off ? What of the horseback riding, or the time she fell, spread-legged, on the balance beam during gymnastics? Not to mention several late-night dry-humping sessions in Topanga Canyon and at the Santa Monica Pier, then in D.C., at more than one party where too many martinis had made her let many a Democratic finger dip in. How had her mother gotten in? Sharon thought as Dennis pushed harder and harder, standing on the rug now for leverage, his early gentleness usurped by this unaccomplishable mission. When she’d let out a cry of intense pain, they’d finally disconnected and headed to George Washington Hospital to see what all this suffering was about. Who could have known that Sharon had an unbreakable hymen? There, a surgeon went in with a scalpel.
Sharon could hear Elias returning in the hallway; already she recognized him by his whistle. I’m goin’ where the sun keeps shinin’ through the pourin’ rain. Goin’ where the weather suits my clothes. She knew all the words. And now she remembered the surgeon’s face, looking up at her from below, his front teeth biting his lip, as if he were working hard to please her. Through the haze of the local anesthesia and the humiliation of the moment, a rush of blood and vaginal fluid poured out of her when finally—finally!—the surgeon broke through. She heard a small knock at the door, and when she sprang up to answer, there was Elias, smiling in the hallway, holding a guitar by its neck in his left hand.
Sharon was placing the mushrooms on platters, the browned caps heaped high with bread crumbs and parsley and garlic, and melted butter and Parmesan, when her daughter came into the kitchen, Sigmund’s old trench coat wrapped tightly around her, bringing with her a rush of cold air.
Please let there be a white blouse and black pants beneath that awful moth-eaten coat, thought Sharon. When had her father-in-law ever worn such a thing anyway? She imagined him at some impassioned rally beneath the Forward building, his arm pointed straight to Marx and Engels, set in relief above the second floor. Maybe this black coat had been brand-new then; perhaps it gave him a sense of authority when he wore it to speak for the Workers Party.
“Hi, honey!” Sharon said, turning her head from the silver plate and smiling as if posing for a photograph in her own cookbook.
Vanessa unwound a chunky and endlessly long multicolored scarf her boyfriend had knit for her. Sharon still thought this odd; what seventeen-year-old boy knits? Apparently Jason McFinley did. He was a nice enough kid, but his dyed-blond hair, black at the roots, those weird pointy shoes, gave him less of an air of menace than they seemed to intend. To Sharon, he seemed like a friendly and well-adjusted kid who was always offering to help her in the kitchen, even if he’d show up at the house and Vanessa was nowhere to be found.
She tried not to watch too carefully as Vanessa removed the overcoat, which thankfully revealed a white oxford-cloth dress shirt, if rumpled and far too big, tucked into a pair of black corduroys. This would be fine under the white apron the servers folded down and wore tied around their waists. Vanessa threw the heavy coat over one of the kitchen chairs, and just as Sharon was going to instruct her as to exactly where she should put it, Marlene swept in.
“Thank you so much for helping us!” Marlene gave Vanessa a big hug as she took her coat fro
m the chair. She looked like a bear next to Vanessa, so fleshy in contrast to Vanessa’s bird bones.
“No problem.” Vanessa looked at the floor, then up at Marlene. “So what should I do?”
“Well.” Marlene scanned the room. She put the coat on the couch at the other end of the kitchen. “What do you think, Sharon?”
“Let’s see.” Sharon placed both hands on her hips and surveyed the chaotic room. “Do you want to pass, honey, or do you want to just clean up as people go?”
Vanessa ignored her mother and instead answered Marlene. “I’d like to serve stuff, I think. I mean, that’s what I’m here for, right?”
“Absolutely,” Marlene said. “Why don’t you pass the fish balls, then?”
“Okay.”
“You know, you hold the tray, let them dip in the sauce, and then pass a napkin. Like this.” Marlene mimed the gesture.
“Got it,” Vanessa said, and Sharon knew, were it she instructing, Vanessa would be enraged.
“It’s not a huge party, and there are three other servers,” Marlene continued. “Tom, Leslie, and Helen.” She gestured to the table where they were piling mini-quiches on platters, and Vanessa looked over and nodded. “Tom and Helen will be serving champagne as the guests arrive and then the white wine, no red because of the carpets and the white chairs. You and Leslie are serving the hors d’oeuvres, and then they’ll be helping with the empties. When the meal is ready, we’ll be plating here.” Marlene spread her hands rather tentatively over the kitchen island. “And you’ll be serving at the table. So it’s important to be very, um, well, proper. Then Sharon does the jubilee at the end.” Marlene looked over at Sharon. “Remember the white chairs, Sharon,” she said softly. “And voilà!” Marlene brushed her hands together. “Be sure to serve from the left. And you pick up from the right. But beverages, should you be serving, are always from the right. Basically, you never serve so the back of your arm faces the guests. Like this.”
Something Red Page 15
