This Is Not for You

by Jane Rule

  I didn’t point out that you were begging, borrowing, and stealing yours. I did not know how to attack from my own indefensible position. I was also suffering from a failure of imagination. It was so difficult to believe that you actually had carefully worked out a principle for stealing rummage. After you had drawn my attention to the saddle shoes, I began to take nervous notice of all your clothes. Those worn that I hadn’t before seen you wearing were obviously part of your growing moral wardrobe. It was not handsome. You looked more like a penitent than a crook.

  “Esther doesn’t look well to me,” Mother said after you had been to dinner one night.

  “She’s just in a seedy mood,” I said.

  “Why don’t you take her along with you when you go off next month?”

  “I might,” I said, not really having thought about it. “I’ll ask her.”

  We agreed to take a trip, but neither of us could decide just where to go.

  “Why don’t we just drive?” you suggested.

  “We might have trouble with reservations.”

  “We could put sleeping bags in the car.”

  That kind of vagueness reminded me too much of our summer in Europe. Having to make a dozen decisions a day for want of having made one before hand would put me in a restless, bad temper the whole time. When I read in the paper that Sandra Mentchen was giving a concert in Los Angeles, she provided the arbitrary destination we needed.

  Doris arrived conveniently just an hour after Christopher Marlowe Smith left the same airport with borrowed, not stolen, funds. She had an album full of photographs of Ann’s wedding which, for all the months it had dominated her letters, hadn’t really occurred to me until I caught quick glimpses as you and Doris handed the photographs back and forth across the front seat on the drive home.

  “Were parts of it appalling?”

  “Oh, yes, but Frank and Frank got on surprisingly well, and Ann was amused and relaxed about it.”

  “What’s he like?” you asked.

  “Like the young men Frank wanted you to marry—tall, proper, responsible.”

  “Don’t you like him?”

  “Very much,” Doris said, smiling. “He’s just the sort of person Ann should have married. She’s orderly that way, always has been.”

  “I admire that,” you said. “She looks beautiful, doesn’t she?”

  Your shyness about and obvious interest in Ann’s wedding made me wonder how uneasy you might be with your own circumstance.

  “A woman shouldn’t be over thirty,” you said in a decisive tone.

  “Ever?” Doris asked.

  “To marry,” you clarified. “I’ll marry before I’m thirty.”

  “How are all your other projects going?”

  “All right,” you said. “I read a poem the other day about Persephone who was called, ‘for hell too fair, for earth too wise.’ It made me wonder if certain kinds of knowledge do disqualify.”

  “Disqualify for what?” I asked.

  “Life,” you answered.

  I felt Doris watching me, and I knew the question in her mind was how far changed the relationship between you and me might be.

  “ ‘Whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe,’ ” I recited.

  “You two leave me behind,” Doris complained.

  “I was teasing E. about Milton,” I said. “She thinks so much pure doctrine for an anti-Christian. Do you want to be dropped off at your place, E.?”

  When you had left us, Doris said at once, “How can she dress like that?”

  “It’s a new sort of costume—stolen sack cloth and ashes.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know, Doris. The character she’s living with has some odd ideas.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “He. Christopher Marlowe Smith.”

  “You’re making him up!”

  “That sometimes occurs to me, but only when I’m trying to comfort myself.”

  “Is she going to marry him?”

  “Oh, no. She’s taking him like a course, that’s all.”

  “Passing or failing?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “How are you, Kate?”

  “Pretty well. But I’m afraid Mother’s about to fire me. She wants to talk to you about finding a companion.”

  “How marvelous! Here I am braced for a long argument, and there’s not going to be one.”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  This time I wasn’t prepared for Doris’ shock when she saw Mother, who seemed to me so very well.

  “She looks a hundred years old, Kate! And she’s so slow and so vague. I hardly recognized her. How do you manage? What can it have been like for you?”

  I checked my first reply which would have been, “But she’s so much better,” and said instead, “She’s really no trouble. She can do almost everything for herself.”

  “But she’s turned into a vegetable!”

  There was anger in this, which I could have met with an anger that startled my own nerves. I didn’t risk a reply Doris was too caught up in her own emotion to notice mine, or perhaps she took my silence as a sharing of how she felt. She was sympathizing with me guiltily. I went into the kitchen for drinks before the housekeeper wanted me to. The hot clam snacks weren’t ready.

  “Aren’t you going to have your cocktail upstairs with your mother?”

  “Not this one,” I said. “We’ll have several.”

  “You’ve had no tea,” she said, which was as much reproof as she dared.

  “Tell me about Monk and Andy,” I said, as I took the drinks back into the living room. “I haven’t heard from either of them for a while.”

  “That news is all bad,” Doris said. “Did you know Andy’s father had stopped his allowance?”

  “I’d heard something about it.”

  “He’s not going to be able to finish his degree. Frank offered to lend him the money, but Andy says he can’t accept it. He’s not gotten along very fast with his research. It would take him too long. And Ramona’s pregnant.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  “Go to New York. Andy has contacts there, and the salaries are better than in England.”

  “Can he work in the States?”

  “I should think so. I think Mr. Belshaw ought to be shot!”

  “How’s Monk taking it?”

  “Oh, she’s treating the whole thing like a lovely new adventure, which is lucky for Andy, but I don’t think she can really have imagined what it’s going to be like if he doesn’t find a job right away or if he doesn’t find a good one. Andy has some very expensive tastes. And with a baby—”

  “When’s the baby due?”

  “In August, I think.”

  “That might change Mr. Belshaw’s mind,” I said.

  “I doubt it. It sounds to me as if that’s just the kind of mess he wants Andy to be in. And I can’t believe that he really thinks of making a man of Andy. He wants revenge. He’s smart enough to know that financial difficulty is like sickness—it doesn’t improve most people.”

  “Shall we take the next one up and have it with Mother?” I suggested as I picked up Doris’ glass.

  “If we have to,” Doris said, making no attempt to hide her reluctance.

  I had too much invested in Doris as an adult to be able to bear being her childish accomplice against Mother. And I had too much invested in Mother. I did not want to leave them together, but I had no choice, and perhaps, once I was not around for Doris to complain to, she’d get accustomed to Mother as she was now and be more patient with her. But Doris had never been patient with Mother or Mother with her. It was their relationship, their problem. I had to leave it behind.

  In the morning, as I drove over to pick you up, I felt suddenly really glad to be getting away—and not just away I was glad to be taking a trip with you. As I turned into your block, I caught sight of you sitting on your suitcase out on the sidewalk. You had on a yellow cotton
knit suit you certainly hadn’t stolen from a rummage sale. Your hair was up in the soft, held shape that gave you elegance. In fact, you looked posed there on the street, an ad for expensive youth.

  “Let’s go south,” I called, reaching over to open the door for you.

  “I thought you’d never come and you’re ten minutes early.”

  “How long have you been waiting?”

  “Let’s see,” you said, swinging your suitcase into the back seat and then looking at your watch, “about six years,” but it was a cheerful tease, one I could almost answer.

  “Shall we go the coast and take a couple of days?”

  “Lovely”

  Lovely. It didn’t take us long to leave the urgent, interrupting traffic of the freeway, to be up and over the coastal hills to the cooler, subtler spring of the shore and the ocean. We talked a great deal in the familiar, argumentative vocabulary we had learned at college. I remember the paradox of our discussion about subjects in art—the machine and the metropolis—as we drove through miles of almost unpopulated land, forests and rocks and dunes. I talked about the misconceptions in foreign aid and international social work. You talked about the relation of sculpture to public values. We decided to go to Greece. We told each other familiar stories. We turned our friends into ideas. And gradually we talked a little of our problems, mine with Doris and Mother, yours with Christopher Marlowe Smith, but somehow, in the undemanding intimacy of a car moving through that enormous landscape, difficulties diminished to their proper size. On the second afternoon we arrived in Los Angeles not only not tired from our trip but refreshed by it.

  “Are we going to try to get in touch with Sandy before the concert?” you asked.

  “I hadn’t thought about it. Is there any way we could?”

  “I think she’s made Los Angeles home base. She’s probably in the phone book.”

  And so she was. You decided, with greater awareness of emotional subtleties than I was accustomed to in you, that I should make the call. Perhaps living with Christopher Marlowe Smith had some positive educational value after all.

  “We’ve driven down for your concert, at least used it as an excuse,” I explained to a surprised and obviously pleased Sandy.

  “Come right on over,” she insisted. “We’re free this evening. Isn’t that luck?”

  Before we left the motel, which was really too far out of the center of things to suit us, I telephoned home to say that we had arrived safely but wouldn’t have a contact address until the next day.

  “Kate, darling,” Doris said, amused, “the number of urgent messages around here in forty-eight hours needn’t swell profits for Bell Telephone. Unplug us for a while. Have a good, thoughtless time.”

  “Well, I’ll check in in a day or two.”

  “If you’re homesick,” she said.

  She didn’t offer to let me speak to Mother, and I somehow couldn’t ask to. I put the phone down, irritated.

  “It isn’t really all that odd of me to call home, is it? It’s the first time I’ve been away over night in eighteen months.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t mean that,” you said. “She just wants you to have a real vacation.”

  “I suppose so, and I’ve gotten neurotic about Mother. I know that.”

  “Doris doesn’t know—” you began.

  “Why has she got more right to hate Mother than I have to love her?”

  “She doesn’t, Kate.”

  “Doesn’t hate. I can’t earn a mother. Why do I try? Why should it matter?”

  “I don’t know,” you said.

  I was embarrassed, not before you really because you were absolutely uncritical. I was exposed to myself, and I was ashamed of an envy I could do no more than hide. I was ashamed of the moral currency I used to buy myself a place in the world, but I couldn’t have borne the greater shame of behaving like the bastard I was. I took my purse and retreated to the bathroom to readjust the mask which I wore even more for the mirror than I did for the world. Okay, scarface, apologize to Doris, your big sister, permissive parent figure, bloody rival. There are enough un-Freudian facts to be getting on with, or at least another set of them.

  “Is this going to be awkward?” you asked as we drove to meet Sandy.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like you to think so. Are you wishing we weren’t going?”

  “Oh no,” you answered quickly.

  “Out with it. What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t want to make you angry.”

  “E., if you don’t want to make me angry—”

  “Won’t it look like… I mean, won’t Sandy think, because we’re together—”

  “Probably.”

  “I don’t care. I mean, I do care. But you wouldn’t like it, would you? So, what shall I say? Or just not say?”

  I felt terribly tired, terribly depressed, as if every decent, sane thing I did were almost comically irrelevant. I tried to imagine your carefully speaking of Christopher Marlowe Smith, and I couldn’t bear the incredulous or pitying expression on Sandy’s face. I tried to imagine myself in the same pose I’d taken at college, but it seemed unbecomingly grotesque, perhaps even cruel. Why didn’t we simply let her think what she wanted to think? But I couldn’t suggest what amounted to pretense to you.

  “It would be easier for me with Sandy if she did think—I don’t mean to lie. I don’t mean that,” you said, “but—”

  “We don’t have to get that involved, anyway,” I said. “We haven’t been invited to an orgy or a bull session. We’re just having dinner with a friend. Let’s keep it simple.”

  “Right,” you said.

  Unspoken collusion, our little vanity. It made us self-conscious with each other, peculiarly lighthearted. We were laughing at an unpromising joke together when Sandy opened the door. Her look of amused indulgence should have stiffened my back. It didn’t. I kissed her and watched her offer the same greeting to you, noticing the stronger definition of her face, your confident beauty. Then we followed her into a large, piano-dominated living room, furnished expensively and quietly in textures rather than colors. She took the hand of the girl who had stood to greet us. She was not really good-looking, but she had an extraordinarily lively face, full of light and change. She wore loose raw silk, gathered sleeveless at her shoulders, falling straight to the floor, a present from Sandy, I imagined.

  “Esther, this is Esther. And Kate.”

  We could comment at once on your shared name, but we didn’t need to look for conversation. There were so many questions to be asked and answered. And Esther Wilson kept us from feeling guilty about a shared world because she knew a great deal about it herself and because she also moved in and out bringing drinks and snacks, tending the cooking dinner. I did watch her, not only because I was curious but because she asked for my attention and approval. Once, as she left the room, I turned back to your conversation and met Sandy’s eyes. I smiled, wanting to say something, but you were talking urgently about creative morality.

  “Have you given up God then?” Sandy asked.

  “It’s not exactly that,” you said. “It’s being free enough of doctrine to discover God or whatever there is to discover.”

  “There’s a lot to discover,” Sandy said.

  “You’re happy, aren’t you?” you asked suddenly.

  “Yes, in some ways very. Are you?”

  You turned to me uncertainly.

  “We’ve had a bad year,” I said, “with my mother.”

  Esther came back into the room with questions about how we liked roast beef.

  “Could I see the kitchen?” you asked, “and maybe help?”

  Sandy handed me a cigarette and was slow and mannerly about lighting it. Then she said, “How did you break your nose?”

  “Dyke fight in Soho a couple of years ago,” I answered, wondering as I spoke why I had to be crudely inaccurate now.

  “It makes you look sad. What is it about your mother?”

 
I explained briefly, but, when Sandy didn’t comment at once, I added details, the rerouting of Mother’s fears, the preadolescent obscenities, the conscious inhibitions of her mind lifted like the front wall of a doll’s house.

  “So you’ve been being her wall, as well as your own,” Sandy said.

  “Like that a little, yes.”

  “But there’s Esther.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And no,” Sandy concluded. “She’s not living with you.”

  “It’s not been a house for living with—”

  “Neither’s mine,” Sandy said, smiling. “I’m not in it more than three or four months of the year. I have a smaller place in New York, too, but I’m there even less.”

  “What does Esther do while you’re away?”

  “Teaches in the winter. She travels with me sometimes in the summer. I want her to give up teaching…”

  You and Esther had come back into the room. Esther went to Sandy, kissed her lightly and then turned to me.

  “She’d get tired of me, and I don’t want that.”

  “But I do,” Sandy said. “Being tired of you occasionally is just the way I want to live.”

  “Sandy has an ambition to be middle-class and middle-aged. Do you, too, Kate? Are you tired of being young and wildly attractive to women?”

  “Am I wildly attractive to women?” I asked, smiling.

  “Of course you are, isn’t she, Esther? I worry about Sandy on tour, but, if I had you on my hands—”

  “When are you going to feed us?” Sandy demanded.

  “Now, darling. That’s what we came in to say. Come and serve.”

  You had watched like a shy child at too noisy a birthday party and looked at me now with all the appeal of uncertainty. I wanted to make some protective, even possessive gesture, but I was afraid to. It was Sandy who took your arm as we went into the dinner table. I was uneasy for a moment at the table, wondering if I would be expected to hold a chair. I had no real knowledge of the manners of this world.

  “We don’t say grace,” Sandy said to my hesitation.

  The wine at dinner was almost too much for you, but perhaps you needed it to find your way into the imitative candor you usually offered when you were sober. What surprised me—and perhaps it shouldn’t have because of your oddly assertive independence with most men—was that you began to court Esther, not Sandy. If I had had less to drink myself, it would have made me uncomfortable. If I had had fewer months of dislocated living, I would have had stronger defenses against the erotic good humor over coffee and brandy. Sandy did control it, but with amused indulgence. She was not drinking as much as the rest of us. I finally did refuse the second brandy both for myself and for you.