The Whiteness of Bones

by Susanna Moore

  She stopped seeing Tom Sheehan when he asked her if she would play the part of a maid at a fraternity party. She would have to wear a very short black satin maid’s costume, and high heels and fishnet stockings and a coquettish white lace cap. His request had not seemed unreasonable to Tommy and his fraternity brothers, and he was astonished when she told him that she didn’t want to see him again.

  When she thought back over her time with Tommy, she thought about the night she lost her virginity. What had held the most importance for her, the most humiliation, was when, the first time he put his two fingers inside of her, he did so through a hole in her cotton panties. He had been unaware of the hole, she knew, but it had mortified her, and distracted her from the astonishing rush of pleasure she had felt, the heating up of her body as he roughly pushed his fingers inside of her.

  She had met Mr. Kipper once again, in the library, and he had whispered to her in his bad accent, “In Burma, there are four things never to be trusted: rulers, thieves, the boughs of trees, and women.” She had wanted to smash him over the head with the book she was reading, Volume III of The Golden Bough, but she’d held herself to saying wearily, “I know. I know you all hate us, but what do you want me to do?” She should have hit him with the book, rather than ask such a heartfelt question, because Mr. Kipper had grinned and answered, “Just love me a leetle.” She had packed up her papers and notebooks and left the library.

  It was not long after this that she stopped going to classes.

  She stayed in her room for weeks, eating Butterscotch Krimpets and reading all of the Balzac she could find, listening over and over to the Bach Suites for Cello until her roommate, a nice girl from Beverly Hills, threw the cassettes out of the third-floor window. Mamie rushed out of the dormitory in her old muumuu to search for the tapes in the bushes. It was the first time she had been out of the dorm in a month. It was while she was on her hands and knees pawing through the pachysandra that some boys coming back from track practice stopped in curiosity to watch her and she realized that she would not be graduating that year from the University of California. She never found the tapes. She had gained fourteen pounds from the Krimpets. She figured about three books a pound. She was gone in a few days, using the plane ticket Aunt Alice had sent her as a graduation present, leaving the muumuu and the paperbacks under her bed.

  As the weather at last turned fair and warm, Mamie began to understand more fully certain things she had once read—Ethan Frome, for example, and the Dylan Thomas poem “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.” As someone whose previous experience of cold was limited to one very rainy February in 1973 when the temperature at the Lihue airport plummeted to seventy-one degrees, and whose idea of spring was defined by early English poetry, Mamie was stirred and elated to discover that although the weather did not change very much every day, as it did on islands where there were rainstorms and drought all in one afternoon, the weather changed in an invisible, slower and larger way. There was winter. And then there was lovely spring. Mamie even went back to reading Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Frost. She fought the impulse, some particularly lovely evenings when she walked home from Deardorf’s, to speak to every person she saw on the street for she had been told many times by Alysse that the first rule of the street was “no eye contact, darling.” Mamie was someone who, by her very nature, sought eye contact, so it was difficult for her to practice this life-saving discipline.

  As she walked home those gay, light-filled evenings, she noticed that there were really very few ways of approach in the city. You did not take shortcuts through backyards or climb over fences. Distances were perfectly linear and perfectly defined. It is not unlike society, Mamie thought. Imagination is not required, nor originality. There seem to be clear rules about how to get to where you want to be, whether it is to dinner at Mrs. Gilette’s or to the corner of Greenwich and Desbrosses.

  Mamie and Claire now spent every evening in Alysse’s kitchen and Mamie no longer needed to squander all of her small salary on Reuben sandwiches and Entenmann’s pound cakes. As she had anticipated, Claire effortlessly won over the wary, lazy Lydia, who cooked enormous dinners for them of black beans and rice and chicken. They sat at the kitchen table and listened to Tito Puente tapes while Lydia fed them. Claire still read aloud the want ads, Mamie still took off her shoes and stockings, and Lydia petted and spoiled them.

  When Lydia cleaned the kitchen after them, she whispered to the food that she had to throw away. “Oh, poor beans. Good beans. I’m so sorry, little things, to throw you out. Do you forgive me, little ones? Lo siento,” she said as she scraped the food left on the plates into the garbage. Claire, was quite startled the first time that it happened. Mamie had seen Lydia do it before, her favorite occasion being one afternoon when she found her apologizing to the remains of a roast leg of lamb.

  “It’s what intellectuals like to call magic realism,” Mamie explained to Claire.

  When Lydia finished, she sat with them at the table. They drank red wine and strong Puerto Rican coffee and read Alysse’s fashion magazines, discussing endlessly what they should do with their hair and their lips and their eyebrows. Both girls, whose brown hair came to their shoulders, decided to grow their hair long. Lydia was thinking more along the lines of a wig.

  “Lyddie,” Claire said idly, studying the photograph of a nude blond woman lying across a saddle, “Do you know where my Aunt’s stepchildren are?”

  “¿Quien?”

  “I’ve already asked Alysse,” Mamie said, interrupting. “She says she has no idea what happened to them.”

  “She would, wouldn’t she?” Claire turned the page. “Maybe I’ll ask her.”

  Claire and Alysse had become special friends. Claire had charmed her. It is safe to say that Claire had charmed the entire apartment building. Claire’s charm slid down the lacquered walls of Alysse’s library and across the paneled hall into the elevator and right out under the canopy onto Park Avenue. Claire and Alysse had long, drunken lunches. Alysse felt more comfortable with Claire than she did with Mamie. Mamie was a little slow, in Alysse’s eyes, and a little too, “I don’t know,” she would say, “A little too … bookish.”

  Mamie was admiring a photograph of a pair of high heels made entirely of canary feathers. They were very beautiful.

  “Alysse told me she was famous for her lovely feet,” Mamie said.

  “She told me she was famous for her lovely blow jobs.”

  Mamie looked up. “Really?”

  Claire nodded. “That’s the difference between us.”

  “It’s so disappointing.” Mamie closed the magazine, discouraged.

  “That’s why I’ll ask her about Courtney and Brooke.”

  “Ask her about Mother, too, while you’re at it, will you?”

  “Mother?”

  “She’s the only person left in the universe who knows anything about Mother. I’m so curious about her. How she came to be the way she is, so odd and so—” Mamie hesitated guiltily. “So uninteresting.”

  “I think Mother just is that way.”

  “She can’t be,” Mamie said. “It would be too devastating.”

  “You expect so much,” Claire said.

  Lydia was wiping the coffee grounds from the strainer. “Pobrecitos! Unlucky little coffees. Poor little things,” she moaned sorrowfully.

  “You think I’m bad, Lily once broke up with a boy because he said ‘thank you much’ to her father. To her father!” Mamie said. “Can you imagine?”

  Lydia liked being with them, although she did not try to follow their talk. She sat down and tapped her big hands on the table in time to the music.

  “If someone ever says to you, ‘I’m a people-watcher,’ start running.”

  “What else?” Claire asked, shaking her head in amused disapproval.

  “ ‘Sea change.’ ”

  “You’re such a snob!” Claire said. “You do expect so much.”

  “But I get so little! I
get famous feet and you get famous blow jobs. Do you think it’s fair?”

  “It’s supposed to be good for your complexion.”

  “That explains my skin,” Mamie said, and poured more wine for them.

  They were still sitting there discussing beauty secrets (Lydia had heard from her daughter in Los Angeles that there was a cream that caused you to lose ten pounds a week for as long as you massaged it into your thighs) when they heard the front door of the apartment open and close.

  Alysse was home. From the way that she whispered and giggled in the hall, they could tell she had someone with her. They heard her say, “Oh, Rod, you couldn’t.”

  “Rod!” Mamie said with a shout. “Rod?” She put her face in her hands, laughing.

  Claire whispered, “Be quiet! Be quiet!”

  Mamie stood up, and Lydia motioned in fright to her. Claire shook her head in warning. Mamie had not intended to go out into the hall, only to clear away some of the many empty wine bottles, but she sat down again to make them happy. Claire was leaning forward, very still, listening to the sounds of kisses and giggles that slid under the kitchen door.

  Suddenly, the door swung open and Alysse’s face, flushed and smeared, but happy, appeared in the small space between the door and the kitchen wall.

  “Good news,” she said. She was drunk. “I’ve found you an apartment. Vivi Crawford—!” She was pulled away by someone standing on the other side of the door. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she said quickly as she was tugged from view and the door closed in little jerks.

  The three women in the kitchen sighed and carried their dirty glasses to the sink.

  EIGHT

  Alysse proposed that Mamie and Claire stay in Vivi and Whit Crawfords’ apartment on Central Park West. The Crawfords were very pleased with the arrangement (Whit Crawford did not want just anyone touching his things), especially after meeting Claire, whose charm continued its steady roll through the city.

  Mamie was very relieved that they would be able to leave Alysse’s apartment. She noticed that Alysse was much nicer now that she knew they would be leaving in a few weeks and Mamie did not blame her. Mamie was very eager to leave. As difficult as it is to have a guest, Mamie thought, it is also very hard to be a guest. I, for one, am a nervous wreck.

  Alysse had become very attached to Claire. She would miss her at morning coffee. No more drunken afternoons running up and down the escalator at Deardorf’s. Alysse had bought both girls many presents, but Claire had been outfitted from head to toe during these afternoons, like a bride with a trousseau.

  “You promise we’ll still have lunch? And play ‘Animals’?” Alysse asked Claire with a little pout. At lunch, Alysse always insisted that they play her favorite game of picking the animal they’d most like to be. It was another of Alysse’s tests. She, herself, always chose to be “a deer with wings.”

  Claire promised.

  “It’s just a ying-yang kind of thing with us,” Alysse said in a babyish voice.

  “I think it’s yin,” Mamie said. She had just come into the room.

  “Who?” asked Alysse.

  “Alysse wants to give us a farewell dinner,” Claire said to change the subject.

  “Not farewell, Claire. An introductory dinner. A launching dinner. A Claire and Mamie dinner!” The very idea excited Alysse and seemed to instantly divert her from her grief at their departure. “I’m going to make the guest list right now!”

  Mamie had promised Alysse that she would return some books for her to a store on Madison Avenue. Mamie was interested in the idea of returning books (“I didn’t like this Proust. Have you anything else?”) and while waiting for the credit slip, she bought for Claire Washington Square and The House of Mirth. She said that they would try to find the settings of the novels on one of their walks. Claire, who was not so serious a reader as Mamie, said, “Well, let me read them first.”

  “Have you ever noticed,” Mamie said, “that tragic heroines are allowed to live only if they have private incomes?” The ten quick minutes in the book shop had been enough to start Mamie thinking. They walked west through the Park.

  Claire looked at her. “What about Alysse?”

  “I would hardly call her income private. She has a public income. And she’s not a heroine. She’s a success. She thinks of me, however, as the poor relative, the one who’s had to wear the hand-me-down shawls and become a governess, the cousin who comes in useful at the last minute when the placement is one woman short. As you have seen, I am always seated next to the most boring, most shallow (although I admit it’s a close call), homosexual there. Usually that art critic Henry Jones’s boyfriend. The one from North Africa.”

  “Next time don’t go,” Claire said. It annoyed her that Mamie had not yet learned how to decline invitations.

  “I’m always caught off guard. I know that other people have little lies they know by heart: ‘I’m so terribly sorry, but I’ll be in Maine,’ and I even know that the other person, the hostess, knows it’s a polite fib and doesn’t mind too much because she tells the same lie—it’s part of the convention. But when I try it, Aunt Alice refuses to play by the rules. She asks, ‘Who do you know in Maine?’ and then I’m flustered and caught out. And end up next to the Moroccan who hates being seated next to the poor relative just as much as I dread being seated next to him. We’ve both said everything there is to say, ever, in the history of the world, about Paul Bowles.”

  “You’re a heroine,” said Claire.

  Mamie turned to look at her. It was not like Claire to say anything kind to her. In her enthusiasm, Mamie did not see that Claire may have been teasing her.

  “I have just finished the strangest, loveliest book by Sybille Bedford. Perhaps what the critics say is true, that books nowadays are small and self-absorbed, you know, how can you write about the seventies and not mention Vietnam, that argument. Well, they would approve of A Legacy. It is about Germany before the First World War and I had to keep reminding myself just who my metaphors were: the decline-of-the-Catholic-Church-in-the-secularized-confederacy and so on, but in the book there is a most inspiring heroine, Caroline Trafford, and she is the one who started me thinking. She had a private income.”

  “You speak as if she were real.”

  “What I am trying to say is that, in books at least, a tragic heroine who happens to have money of her own will be allowed to live. If not, she dies: Lily Bart, Nastasya Barashkov. The dreaded Emma Bovary. And Tess. Think of Tess! But if she has a little private family money, like Christina Light or Ellen Olenska, she only suffers.” She looked at Claire. “You see? You don’t die!”

  She was making Claire nervous. “Get a grip, Mamie. Get a grip.”

  Mamie was still too preoccupied with her heroines to be offended. “Actually, I exaggerate a little,” she said. “They don’t all die. Some become private secretaries to very mean, old, rich women.”

  “Perhaps you should write this down. An article for Cosmopolitan,” Claire said lightly. She was not feeling the pleasure she usually experienced when teasing Mamie. For whatever reason, Mamie, by insisting on taking her sister’s words literally, was refusing to acknowledge her sarcasm.

  “I am not a heroine,” Mamie said.

  Oh, no? Claire thought.

  “No,” Mamie said. “Definitely not.”

  Mamie and Claire arrived at the dark, tireless river in time to watch the city to the east of them catch fire with the light of the setting sun. On her last visit to the Hudson, Mamie had suddenly realized why it was that the city did not concern itself more with its rivers. In true American style, the rivers were too big. It was hard to imagine stone footbridges arching gracefully to Fort Lee. These wide, dirty estuaries were for commerce, not pleasure. She did not like the rivers any less for her discovery.

  Claire admired the red sky and the cold black river and this pleased Mamie, who was worried that her long monologue about heroines had sounded hysterical. Mamie had no one to talk to about these thing
s. Certainly Miss Magda, who ran the girl ragged at work, was not interested in hearing her theory about “Older Women in the French Novel.” When Mamie arrived at boarding school, and even when she went on to college, she was so unused to hearing certain words spoken that she pronounced many words incorrectly. She had only read the word. She had never actually heard anyone in Honolulu say “St. John Perse” or “Weltanschauung” or “Cu-chulain.” She had made many mistakes at college and even now, in her rare, extended conversations, usually with startled clerks in bookstores, she still winced preparedly before she ventured out with “roman à clef.”