Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  Her third and last hypnosis date was with a boy from her own class, Max Shubert, wbo virtually lived by himself in his mother’s house because she was always at work or at one of her lovers’. Max told Isadora on the phone that she was a nurse. She was good at it, he said, and she let him do whatever the hell he pleased. They had a pact to never question each other, to always let things ride. He kept that house open and his friends were always winding in and out, smoking joints and drinking his beer, making great glassy pitchers of lemonade improvised from whiskey sour mix and water, clinked with ice and then poured into jelly glasses festooned with Disney mice.

  He talked a great deal on the phone. He didn’t seem to mind that Isadora uttered little more than swallowed syllables, than snaps of answers. He didn’t even wait for her to accept his date. He simply assumed that she would, and then he cut into another subject. He wanted to talk about movies. He asked her if she liked foreign films, if she knew Antonioni, Fellini. He surprised Isadora with the way he shaped his sentences, so clean and tight and inescapable. But she couldn’t place his face until the day he showed up at her door, tall and thin with huge black eyes and shiny black curls. She stared at him, enchanted. She could vaguely remember him as the boy at the party who had the brandy bottle. Now he was wearing a faded sweatshirt that said Harvard in crimson letters and an old pair of jeans.

  Isadora never got a chance to watch the film. They ended up at Max’s house because he said there was a movie on TV they could watch and he’d rather sit and talk to her and be comfortable than go into a theatre and deal with people coughing and rustling and being ignorant the way they always were. He told her he had even cleaned up the place a little, bad thrown out the stuff in the freezer that was clotting with mold, and had bought fixings to make pizza. Isadora couldn’t shake an undercurrent of feeling. She couldn’t relax completely because she was too aware that this was her last hypnosis date. From now on she would have to fend for herself.

  His house was in the Madison suburbs. It was musty-smelling and cluttered with cigarette packages. Max made no excuses, though. He didn’t even bother to lift up the magazines and newspapers from the seats of the chairs so she could sit down. Instead, he dropped to the floor and he tugged her right down with him. “So, Miss Isadora,” he said. “How come I never noticed you in school?”

  “You weren’t looking hard enough,” she said, stretching, teasing herself into a yawn.

  “I guess I wasn’t,” he said. “Boy, did I miss out.”

  Neither of them moved for the TV. They sat and talked. He told her about his mother’s lover who sold stair glides to heart patients so they could ride up their stairs instead of walk. He asked about her family and she talked about Martin, about teeth, and she said Duse read a great deal. He smiled and she reached up her hand to touch it. She wasn’t surprised when he bent forward and kissed her. It was simply another layer of something she wanted to experience, something she could have because of the hypnosis. She sniffed at his neck, at the narrowing ends of his hair, at the warm spots beneath his shirt. Her senses kept strengthening, intoxicating her.

  Isadora’s first sexual experience would be under hypnosis. Later, she wouldn’t remember the act as much as she would recall the textures and tastes, the scents. She would remember the way his whole body jointed together, the way his knees buckled, the way the hair tangled and was soft under his arms. She would remember where his neck attached to his shoulder, how that felt to her fingers.

  It was easy to fall into, to start undoing buttons. She felt the physical pull, the draining insistent yearning. She was her mother’s daughter. She twisted and tore about among the detritus on the floor, she wrenched herself free of his arms and then pushed herself back into them. She maneuvered her body as she writhed. But unlike Duse, Isadora was completely silent, she made no sound at all outside of the rustlings of her body. He kept asking her over and over if she used the pill, if she had any birth control, or did she want him to get up and get something to protect them both? When she didn’t answer, he sat up, he pulled himself free of her and asked again, but she refused to hear him. She didn’t want anything rational invading her sensory landscape, and she hid her face deep in her red hair.

  “Talk to me,” he said, and when she didn’t, he sighed, he got up and stretched so he could fiddle in one of the table drawers. She heard the snap of plastic. She had seen condoms. Teddy had shown her one, had said that after she went to Planned Parenthood and got the pill, her boyfriend and she had celebrated by buying packets upon packets of condoms. They had taken them into the dorm bathroom and filled them up with cold water and had dropped them from the third floor window. All the while, a clot of students below them cheered.

  She didn’t much like the feel of plastic against her. She tried tearing it free, but he gripped her wrist, he held it to the rug.

  She bled. “Oh shit,” he said, hoisting himself up. “I’ll get a damp rag or something.” He stood up and she watched him. She saw how pale his flesh was. When he came back, he swabbed at the stain until it cleared and then he lay down, bracing his back against the couch, drawing her up along him so that their skin was touching. “I like you,” he said. “Girls that I just fuck, I do them in the bedroom. Over my bed I have this peace symbol drawn in, and these marks. Everytime I get myself a piece, I make a mark. Some of them figure out what I’m doing and get mad, but I never want to see them again anyway. I never care. Others—the real bimbos—never even get the message.”

  “That’s lovely,” said Isadora.

  He looked surprised. “I didn’t mean you,” he said. “I told you all that so you would know that I think you’re different, so you would know that you aren’t just someone I’m fucking.”

  “I want to take a shower,” said Isadora.

  “Me too,” he said.

  “Me first,” Isadora said, standing, not letting him follow.

  When he took his shower, she stretched out, clean and damp and naked on his couch, a sheet drawn over her, and she fell asleep. When she woke, she felt the hypnotic spell missing, and it flustered her. He was sitting in a chair opposite her, watching her. She couldn’t meet his eyes; she told him she had to go home.

  “It’s not that late,” he said. He tried to wrap his arm about her when she was dressing, but she pulled back, and when they were both in the car, she sat as close to the window as she could. “You okay?” he said.

  She lay her head flat against the vinyl seat so she wouldn’t have to try and pull words out of her and string them into a conversation. He seemed content enough with the silence. He didn’t prod, and when he dropped her off, he kissed her on the top of her head; he said that he would call her.

  As soon as she got inside, she took another shower. She stood under the jet, letting the water heat up as it pulsed down on her, and it wasn’t until she stepped free of the hissing water that she saw the angry red of her skin. I don’t know him, I don’t even think I like him, she thought, and then she stepped back under the water and began to violently wash her hair, trying to replace those memory sensations with real ones, trying to get herself back in place.

  He did call her again and again. She saw the notes Duse tacked up. She pulled them down so Duse would think she was returning the calls. When she heard the phone ring she’d lock herself in the bathroom. In school, she saw him waiting outside of her classes. She would think of any excuse to leave early, to be in another part of the school before he could get to her. She couldn’t think how he seemed to know where she was, and she felt stalked. She would pivot and stand around talking to the teacher, all the time watching Max out of the corner of her eye, seeing how he just stood there, how he waited. He got tired eventually and left, and then she sprinted to her next class.

  He called one evening at dinner and Duse simply put the receiver into Isadora’s hand.

  “What’s wrong?” Max said. “Why don’t you want to see me? I have eyes. I see you hiding from me, dashing here, racing off someplace everytime I
try to catch up. I liked you,” he insisted. “Didn’t you see how I didn’t make you just a mark on my wall?”

  “It’s different,” said Isadora, wrapping the phone cord around her hand, tightening it against her skin. “That’s all.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re the one who’s different.”

  “I’m just who I always was,” said Isadora. “Maybe you just never saw the way that was.”

  “Maybe,” he said. He sighed a lot. She could hear his air pulsing through the receiver, she could almost feel that warm breath against her ear, and she pulled back. She could feel his hands on her and something inside of her caught.

  “Look,” he said, his words dragging. “You change your mind about me, you call. All right?”

  “All right,” she said. He said that he thought they could make a really good pair, that he could see them coupled, and when he hung up, his voice was hopeful. Isadora, though, sat on the kitchen stool, the receiver in her hand. She heard the silence turn into the dial tone, and she sat and listened to that, too, before she finally hung up.

  10

  Isadora applied to colleges as far away as she could. She wouldn’t listen when Martin told her how good the local university was, how she could find a cheap apartment and be on her own right here. She shook her head; she stayed stubborn.

  She ruined her hands, biting the nails down so low they bled, she kept her hair in braids, her legs in patched black jeans. She wouldn’t wear Duse’s colors—redhead colors, the salesgirls called them, the greens and golds—and when a salesgirl lifted out a blue sweater, Isadora would stop her hands with her own, she would riffle through the racks until she found something black, something as orange as an egg yolk. Duse, watching her, said nothing other than repeating that she had never wanted Isadora to be her.

  Isadora was desperate to sever herself from everything familiar. She didn’t want to be Duse; it bothered her when she remembered how once she had. Now, though, she sensed something else: She didn’t want Duse to be Duse either.

  It bruised her to see the way her mother was. She couldn’t stand hearing all the stories of her growing up, of how Duse had thrown an egg over the house to ensure a good birthing. Isadora would come home from school and see Duse avidly reading the National Enquirer, so engrossed that she wouldn’t hear Isadora thunking off her boots, slamming her books down on the end table. Duse teased the pages, and when she came to an article she wanted—usually something about psychic phenomena—she would rip it out with her thumb nail and tuck it into the waistband of her skirt. “How can you read that?” Isadora said. It mortified her.

  She’d sometimes wait around for Duse to finish that tabloid just so she could make sure that paper was out of the house. She’d tuck it down to the bottom of the garbage, sullying the print so Duse couldn’t read anything else from it. It made her think of all those women on the bus that she saw reading that stuff, women with their hair five colors, women who wore those stretchy stirrup pants in flat bright colors, who crossed their legs so you could see the places where the seams were splitting. “People make fun of that paper,” Isadora said. “All that business about little boys being reincarnations of Bible kings, all those predictions about UFO’s. If everyone on earth held their breath, none of that would jell.”

  Duse put the paper down. “I don’t know what you’re getting so huffy about. I don’t take this seriously,” she said evenly. “But sometimes they print something decent. And anyway, I like to know the garbage. It helps me to separate myself from that kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing? It’s what you do; it’s all the same.”

  “No,” said Duse, “it isn’t.” She looked at Isadora. “You ever hear of Jung? Ever happen to read about a man called Wilhelm Reich? Those two men believed in spirits, in the unexplained. They knew that science isn’t just the things you can touch and prove and write out on paper.”

  Isadora slanted her head toward Duse. “How do you know about Jung?” she said.

  “You think I’m stupid, don’t you? Don’t look away like that. I see what goes on in that mind of yours. I know the kind of people you mean when you make fun of this paper. I don’t like them either, those flits who believe anything, who waste their time with tarot cards and astrology and phony séances and who sit out on the front stoop just waiting for the flying saucers to take them to a new moon colony. I’m selective. I can’t believe anything that doesn’t originate with me. I’m not stupid. I go to the library, I read other things, I had an education. I don’t want you thinking that—it hurts me. You hear that—it hurts.”

  “Reich was crazy,” said Isadora quietly. “They locked him up.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Duse. “Well, let me tell you something. Sometimes crazy is just a catchall word for things you don’t want to understand.”

  “And sometimes,” said Isadora, “it’s not.”

  Duse would never have gone on television if she hadn’t suddenly felt the need to prove something to Isadora. She really felt that TV might validate her talents, that Isadora might respect her if she saw the way the TV people treated gifts, if she saw how an audience gave her credibility and shape. The appearance was arranged by one of Duse’s clients, a woman who worked for a small local TV show called “City Living.” She wanted Duse to share half an hour with a silhouette artist from Maine, a nice old man who could cut out faces from colored paper freehand with a pair of child’s scissors. What Duse would do would be to simply explain herself and then to read a palm or perhaps some object from the audience.

  Duse wanted Martin to come with her. “You don’t have to be in the audience. You don’t even have to come inside. Just sit out in the car and read, just so I’ll know you’re nearby, that you support me.” He never denied her; she knew he’d come. With Isadora, though, it was different. She saw how Isadora’s face clamped shut when she told her about the TV appearance. She was surprised, too, to see a sudden snapping movement of fear.

  “I thought you hated publicity,” Isadora said.

  “Not if it’s respectable, if people are really interested.”

  Duse said she could get Isadora on the show, too, if Isadora wanted, but she felt that look on Isadora’s face crawling over her skin. “I can give you a note so you could watch the program right in school. They must have a teacher’s lounge.”

  “I’ll watch if I can,” said Isadora uneasily.

  “That’s the easy thing to say, isn’t it?” said Duse. “I want you to watch, I know you don’t want to. You’re ashamed of me, as if what I did was so terrible, as if I walked the streets lifting up my skirts to anything, as if I needled drugs into my veins.” She sighed. “Your father’s coming. Did you know that? Does that change anything?”

  “He’s just sitting outside.”

  “That’s all right. He can’t be comfortable with that part of mylife, but he still supports me. And anyway, you, Baby, are my flesh and blood.”

  “I know,” said Isadora.

  Isadora was grateful that there was no publicity. It was just a little afternoon show; the TV listing never even bothered to name the guest. On the morning of Duse’s TV appearance, Isadora set her alarm an hour early and walked to school. She thought it was better to just take the note Duse left for her; she didn’t want Duse calling the school to remind her, or worse, bringing the note herself. Isadora folded the paper and lined it into the bottom of her purse, settling it into the crumbs of the packaged cupcakes she had bought yesterday. That note didn’t mean one damn thing, it didn’t force her to see that program. And she didn’t see it as giving in either. She thought that maybe Duse would relax a little if she lied, if she said she had seen the show.

  Isadora couldn’t have stayed home to witness all that morning hustle. She knew it would be difficult to see the haphazard way Duse dressed, the way she would forget her sleeve buttons, the way she would leave the clasp on her necklace open so that the chain would slip down into the V of her blouse and the cool of the metal would make her
jolt. Isadora didn’t want to hear Martin’s soothing conversation, didn’t really want to hear anything—not just the talk, but also the crunchy breakfast sounds, the liquid slurps of juice. If she were at that table, she’d have to take in Duse’s triumph as if it were part of the meal, as if it could nourish her.

  She was angry with Duse. But she was angry with Martin, too. She hadn’t realized how it might stretch to include him. He was an uninvolved accomplice, she thought. He didn’t have to pacify Duse the way he did, and in doing so, put Isadora in the wrong.

  As soon as she got to school, she pushed into the nearest ladies room and moved for a stall, ignoring the clot of girls layering black mascara onto their spiky lashes. She held her breath against the smoke from their cigarettes. She took the note and ripped it into pieces and then she flushed it—three times—down the toilet.

  She moved uneasily through her classes. Every time the phone rang, she thought it was a summons from Duse. Duse had changed her mind; she was waiting in the office to taxi Isadora right over to the station; she had already told the principal and half the teachers milling about in that office that she was going to be on TV and that Isadora was her daughter. Isadora was in algebra class when she noticed the time. Duse was just going on the air. The numbers scrawled on the board dipped and slid as her eyes lost their focus. She couldn’t concentrate on anything except the feel of the second hand on the white clock face, the way it neatly sliced up the minutes right inside of her. Her teacher snapped at her. He was so annoyed at her dreaming that he threatened her with detention. He prodded her to the board to do a variable equation. She felt his disdain, but it didn’t matter. She started to relax when the half hour was over, when Duse’s airtime was finished, and then, with a spurt of energy, she began participating in her class. She raised her left arm and offered to put the next problem up on the board, she said she was sure she knew the answer.