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This Is My Daughter

Page 10

by Robinson, Roxana;


  Rachel tilted her head to one side, her eyes narrow with resentment.

  “Next time you spend the night out, will you tell me beforehand, so I don’t spend all night worrying is the door double-locked, and listening for Tess from the other end of the apartment?”

  Guilt froze Emma. “Yes, of course,” she said, frowning, her tone distant. She turned away and took her bowl to the sink, washing it noisily. She felt mortified. How could I have been so inconsiderate, she wondered. Still, she resented Rachel’s criticism. I won’t apologize, she thought. I won’t let Rachel dictate my behavior. Emma was afraid that if she apologized, she would be admitting to something fundamental, fatal. It would an admission from which she could never recover. It would give Rachel permanent advantage over her. It was too risky. Emma said nothing more.

  Rachel waited, swaying imperiously, Tess in her arms. “If you’re going out for the night, I’ll take Tess in with me.”

  “Fine,” Emma said, nodding, not looking at Rachel. “Good idea. Next time I’ll let you know.” She opened the dishwasher, popped in her bowl, and closed the door with a flourish. “All right, I’m off. See you later.”

  Tess, stilled momentarily by tension, now started a new wail, but Emma was no longer placatory.

  “I’ll see you later, Tessie,” she said, her voice firm. “I love you.”

  Tess wept.

  Emma kissed her, but carefully unwrapped the child’s hands from around her neck, loosening the strands connecting her here, disentangling herself from her domestic world. Her mind was shifting focus. She was now only halfway here with Tess: her heart was here, but her mind was moving on to her next destination. It was now the office that drew her.

  She escaped. As the door closed behind her she could hear Tess’s voice rise into a despairing shriek. In the hall Emma pushed the elevator button and then closed her eyes, trying to shut out the sad wails that came through the wall. She still heard them, wincing, as she stepped into the elevator.

  The elevator door scissored closed. For the second time that morning she fell away, anxious and distressed, setting off for a new place, driven by time, by obligation, hoping that what she was leaving would resolve itself, hoping that the right thing was to move on, go forward, wondering uneasily if it was. She felt stretched, taut; carried along by the momentum of her day, the momentum of momentum itself.

  7

  Emma’s office at Art & Culture was a narrow rectangular box, with one window overlooking Third Avenue. Hanging on the scuffed gray walls were Emma’s favorite posters: a great O’Keeffe flower, deep and luscious, and a long horizontal Winslow Homer of a young woman reading, stretched out full-length on the grass, and completely absorbed by her book. Emma liked the juxtaposition: the life of the mind, the life of the body.

  The small room itself was charmless. The black metal desk was battered, the flimsy metal bookcase stuffed haphazardly with art books and exhibition catalogs. The window was ungenerous, giving onto a small square of revealed sky, cramped by walls of pollution-stained white brick. Emma’s desk, dominated by the computer terminal, was piled with manuscripts. An industrial gray Rolodex sat by a box of Kleenex, a flimsy red stapler and a round Florentine box of paper clips. A pottery mug held a clutch of pencils, pens and a single emery board, worn entirely smooth.

  Emma arrived late. The official hours at the magazine were nine-thirty to five-thirty, but most people came in late and stayed later. Emma didn’t like to stay late because of Tess, so she tried to come in early, but that morning everything slowed her up. It’s the mental transactions, not the physical ones, she thought, turning in to the cavernous lobby. It’s not traveling time, it’s talking time that makes me late. I only allow time for what I have to say, never for what anyone else says back. She thought again of Peter’s cold voice, the cabdriver’s fury, of Rachel, Tess. By the time Emma arrived on the seventh floor it was ten of ten.

  Emma took off her coat and headed for the coffee machine. She could hear Robert, the editor in chief, talking in a terminatory way to the art editor, whose office was next to Emma’s. “Okay,” he said. “Right. Great.”

  But the art editor was trying to keep him. “I also want to talk to you about the June issue,” he said. “The sculpture article.” Emma, who wanted solitude, hoped the art editor would keep Robert with him, and out of her office.

  Robert was determined. “Right,” Robert promised, “we need to discuss it. I’ll get back to you,” he said, then Emma heard his footsteps on his way down the hall.

  Robert was thin and intense, with small gray eyes, a wide Slavic face and a pointed chin. His graying hair was a springy mass of tight curls. He wore round black-rimmed glasses and bow ties. Every morning, as soon as he arrived at work he took his jacket off and rolled his shirtsleeves up, not the decorous two cuffs’ length, but all the way up over the elbow, as though ready for rigorous and unpredictable tasks.

  When Emma returned to her office, Robert was waiting for her.

  “Oh, good,” he said, “you’re here.”

  “Come in,” Emma said, though he was already in, already sitting on the uncomfortable aluminum-frame chair next to her desk. She wanted her office empty, so Peter could call.

  “The Whitney Biennial,” Robert said.

  “Oh, God,” Emma said, and sighed. This exhibition was always huge, boisterous and confrontational. “It’s too early in the morning to think about the Biennial.”

  “Well, try. Think about who we should get to review it.”

  “Hm,” said Emma. She sipped at her coffee, hoping he would leave. “What about Jed Perl?”

  “I thought a woman. Think of a woman.”

  “Oh,” said Emma. She lifted her mug to her mouth. “All right. Let me think.”

  Robert nodded and rose to leave. At the doorway he turned. “D’you think this is sexist?” he asked. “It probably is.”

  “No, no,” said Emma. Go, she thought. She didn’t look at the telephone, for fear this would make it ring.

  “Margot is always talking about creeping sexism,” Robert said. His wife was a lawyer, and fierce. “Toward women, obviously. I’m trying to avoid it, but doesn’t this seem as though I’m being sexist toward men?”

  “You’re not being sexist, you’re being fair,” Emma said. Why didn’t he leave? “This is equal time. I’ll come up with some names.”

  “Or do you want to write it yourself?” Robert asked, turning to go.

  “God, no,” Emma said, shaking her head. “Whatever you say about that show, you enrage half the people in New York. I don’t want all that ambient hatred.”

  “Really?” Robert said, interested. He leaned against the wall. “I like stirring things up. Why do you care if other people disagree with you?”

  “I’m a coward,” answered Emma. “I hate having people angry at me.” Will you go, she thought. Go.

  Robert shook his head. “Women are peculiar,” he said. “I love controversy. It’s the only way to live.” Emma smiled at him, but did not answer. He smiled back, raised his chin toward the winds of conflict, and left at last.

  Emma took a long sip of coffee and set her mug down. She leaned back in her chair, alone, for the first time that day. Solitude, she thought, the greatest luxury. She could now begin to address the day. She would have to think of a woman writer for Robert, though it would do nothing to combat creeping sexism. As long as men were the buyers, the art world would cater to men. She wondered when Peter would call.

  She looked at her desk, avoiding the telephone from superstition. It sat beside her left hand. If it rang, she could answer it on the first ring. Her calendar was covered with notes. She scanned it: this week there was an article due, from a notoriously late writer. She would have to start her calls to him. On the first call he would tell her that the article was going very well, and he was almost finished. At the end of the week, on the second call, he would tell her that he still wasn’t quite finished. By the end of the following week she would no longer be
able to reach him directly. She would leave messages on his machine, and sometime during the week after that he would leave a message on her machine—in the evening, when he knew she wouldn’t be there—telling her that something had come up, and that he wouldn’t be able to turn the article in on time. She would need to call the gallery, too, at some point, for photographs to accompany the article. She would make none of those calls now, though: she wanted to leave the telephone free.

  She thought of Peter, at his office, which she had never seen. She imagined a sleek modern corner room, with plate-glass windows, a big clean desk, a stiff armchair facing it. One wall of legal reference books, in sets, soberly bound. A big potted ficus tree in a corner, tended by a plant person. What was Peter doing, in that office? Was he thinking of her? Why did he not call?

  On her desk was the untidy manuscript of an article to be edited. At Art & Culture they used computers themselves, but they still asked for articles in manuscript. “Hard copy,” they called it, slightly self-consciously: jargon from a strange language. It made ordinary pages sound brisk and inflexible, though they were really gentle and compliant. Text on a screen was held at a cold flickering remove, an endless liquid scroll, floating in deep space. Emma wanted actual ink on rustling paper. Real pages were accessible in a way that a machine was not. The computer, with its tiny glowing lights and faint high-pitched hum, was endlessly busy with arcane internal doings. It waited to be interrupted, but it was already going, already occupied. Its indefatigable busyness, its active readiness to do something, in a rapid electronic manner, intruded between the reader and the text. The only action between a reader and a text ought to be the silent absorption of one by the other—the Winslow Homer woman lying on the grass, oblivious. The computer was useless here. Reading text on a computer was like reading a book while sitting in your car with the engine running.

  Emma picked up the manuscript. The article was deeply respectful, about an artist who embedded bits of plates in his canvases. Emma, who liked Caravaggio and Thomas Eakins, sighed. The language of modern art was so arcane and insular: no one outside a small circle of New Yorkers would have any idea why this idea—broken crockery—was interesting. It was hard to understand, now, why the avant-garde had wanted to cut themselves off from all but the cognoscenti. Why would you not want to include everyone who was interested in art? Why would you work actively to antagonize your audience?

  The telephone rang, and Emma’s hand was on it at once. She let it complete its ring, for dignity, before she picked it up.

  “Emma?” It was Francie; Emma braced herself. She hated talking to her sister.

  Francie was three years younger than Emma. When the girls were little, Emma had looked after her. Francie had been Emma’s doll. Emma had helped her sister dress in the morning. She brushed her hair, told her stories and taught her to skip and to read. Francie believed everything Emma said. The two girls had shared a bedroom until Emma was thirteen.

  On the last night of their shared room, Emma had gone to a school dance. She had brought back contraband from the drugstore, and spent all afternoon getting ready. She washed her hair and cream-rinsed it. She shaved the long slopes of her legs, the awkward hollows of her armpits. She smoothed an herbal mask on her face, letting it cake and dry until her features were white and stiffened, like an African deity. She scrubbed it all off; underneath, her skin was pink and glowing. She leaned close to the mirror and struggled with mascara, dabbing ineptly at the lashes next to her alarmed and fluttering eye. She brushed a tiny drift of rosy brown blusher on her cheekbones. She dipped her finger into the pot of lip gloss and smoothed a shining layer onto her mouth. She arranged her long silky hair on her shoulders.

  Francie, awed and excited, lay on her bed and watched, offering opinions. At first Emma talked and laughed, but as the dance drew closer Emma became quieter. When she began getting dressed, Emma changed her mind over and over. The bed, the chair, the rug became layered with discards. Emma felt dread begin to rise within her. She stopped laughing with Francie. Francie was a child, she knew nothing about this dance, the world of Emma’s classmates. She stopped talking to Francie altogether. She settled finally on her clothes, but they were wrong, she hated them: purple striped hip-hugger bell-bottoms, which felt suddenly tight; the burgundy toes of her favorite boots, poking out beneath them, were scuffed. A white turtleneck and her favorite red tunic top, which had a stain on the shoulder. She looked in the mirror and turned away in despair. She saw how she looked: fat and hopelessly stupid, out of step with the rest of the world. Her friends would see at once that she was a fraud and impostor. When Emma turned away, anguished, Francie drew in her breath.

  “You look beautiful,” she said solemnly.

  Emma, sick with fear, could not answer. Francie’s admiration was proof of how babyish and pathetic she looked. She left, filled with gloom.

  Arriving at the dance, Emma felt her throat close with anxiety. The gym was huge and dark, the music pounding. At first she could find no one. Her friends were in drifting groups that dissolved and merged. Their voices were shrill. Emma did not feel like one of them, and she could think of nothing to say. She heard herself laugh too much, and foolishly. The boy she liked, whose name she had written secretly over and over on the soles of her sneakers, did not look at her once. He danced with another girl twice, but spent most of the evening outside with his friends smoking dope.

  Halfway through the endless night, Emma went into the ladies’ room. When she came in it fell suddenly silent. Three girls, combing their hair, met each other’s eyes in the mirror. Emma, awkwardly, said “Hi,” and there was a chorus of responses, but they looked at her only for a moment. Emma stood at the sink, letting the water run over her hands, hoping dumbly that something would change, that the world would become kind again. She heard a hissing whisper: “She’s not going. Joanna didn’t invite her.” Emma turned off the faucet and left the room without looking back. She had to wait until the end of the dance; she was part of a car pool. For the rest of the evening the sentence burned inside her. She stood alone, at the edge of the dance floor, or in the shadows just outside the side door of the gym.

  At the end of the dance she and four other girls were picked up by someone’s mother. Emma sat in the front with the mother. During the drive the girls didn’t speak to Emma, but when they reached her house they turned suddenly effusive. They called good night in loud bright voices as Emma got out of the car. Emma did not answer. She thanked the mother and turned away toward her house so she would not see the car drive off toward Joanna’s.

  When Emma let herself into the front hall she saw Francie, in her nightgown, sitting at the top of the stairs. Francie’s face lit up and she clapped silently. Emma! she mouthed.

  Emma said loudly, “You’re supposed to be in bed, Francie.”

  “I had a nightmare,” Francie said, defensively, standing up. When Francie woke in the night, Emma had always taken her into bed with her.

  Now Emma made a derisive sound in her nose. “I bet,” she said, still loudly. She went into the living room, where her parents were reading. They looked up as Emma came in. Her mother smiled.

  “I’m back,” Emma announced curtly.

  “Where have you been?” her father asked.

  Emma stared angrily.

  “You know, Everett, she went to a dance. Did you have a good time, Emma?”

  “A dance?” her father said, disapproving. “Dressed like that? You look like a court jester in those silly trousers.”

  Emma turned to leave.

  “Everett,” said Emma’s mother. “Emma, come back.”

  Emma stepped warily into the doorway again.

  “I think you look very nice,” her mother said.

  “She looks nice except for those silly trousers,” her father said. He stared at her. “And what’s that on your chin?”

  Emma put her hand on her chin, scowling. “I don’t know. What?” She lifted her chin. There was a silence. She looked do
wn suspiciously, sideways, at her father. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” he said, looking pleased with himself.

  Emma lowered her chin. “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing after all,” he said.

  “What did you see?” Emma demanded, lowering her chin.

  “It was nothing. Just a little roll of flesh, underneath your chin,” he said. “Nothing. It goes away when you lift your jaw.”

  Emma turned and left the room. She pushed past Francie, who was hovering anxiously in the hall in her nightgown.

  “You are supposed to be in bed,” Emma said furiously to Francie. “Eavesdropper.” As she pounded upstairs Emma yelled down, “I’m not sharing a room anymore with that spoiled brat. I want my own room.”

  When Francie came up Emma was already in bed, curled into a tight ball, the light off. Francie opened the door and came inside. She whispered Emma’s name, but Emma lay still and said nothing. Her chin was sunk deep into her neck, her hands were fists. By now the other girls were all at Joanna’s, whom Emma hated. Maybe the boys had gone there, too. Francie got quietly into her bed, pulled up the covers and lay down, her face toward Emma. They had lain like that in their twin beds, facing each other in the dark, night after night, for as long as Francie could remember. In the light from the window they could see faint gleams from each other’s eyes.

  “Emma?” Francie whispered.

  Emma said nothing.

  “Em?” Francie whispered again, quieter.

  Emma said nothing. Her eyes were not closed, and she knew Francie could see the gleam. She lay without stirring. She had never been to Joanna’s house. It was in Brookline. They would all be there by now. They would be laughing.

  The next day Emma moved into a smaller room down the hall. Her alliance with Francie was over. Emma felt tainted by childhood in Francie’s presence.

  Emma had gone docilely to both their mother’s schools: Milton and Smith. But Francie was tumultuously rebellious. She left Milton after ninth grade and went to public high school in Cambridge. Francie grew her hair, smoked a lot of dope and barely graduated. She refused to go to college. She said college was too structured. She wanted to absorb knowledge by living it. Emma told Francie she was ridiculous, and Francie told Emma she was boring. They drew apart. Francie moved to San Francisco, married, had two small children, and divorced. She came back east seldom, and only to see her parents.

 

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