by Rita Ciresi
“Just because Oozie looked like a leper doesn’t mean you have to treat Dodie like one,” I said.
“I’m not saying treat him like a leper. I’m saying keep your distance.”
“Give me one good reason.”
Carol didn’t answer right away. She was concentrating on her purls. Finally she pursed her lips. “Lisa, somebody needs to tell you this.”
I waited.
“Really tell you. For your own good.”
I waited some more.
“You’re twenty-five,” Carol said. “Twenty-five. You’ll never meet nobody hanging around Dodie.”
“Anybody,” I corrected her. “Meet anybody. And what does one have to do with the other?”
“Do I gotta spell it out to you?”
“You’d probably spell it wrong.”
Carol clicked her knitting needles. “The word is fag hag.”
“That’s two words,” I said, pulling Security Man up and hugging his limp self to my body.
“My, aren’t we such a good editor. No wonder we’ve gotten such a fancy promotion to the la-de-da Hudson River Valley.”
I paused. I stared, hard, at the cellulite busting out beneath the hem of Carol’s shorts. Then I said slowly, “You have fat thighs.”
Instead of stabbing me with her number nines, Carol actually smiled. “Wait ’til I stand up and you get a load of my stomach.” She laughed. “Oh, Lisa! Finally. I’m pregnant. Look at your face! Isn’t it great?”
I sucked in my breath; it tasted acrid as cough medicine. For seven years Carol had been married to Al Dante, and so far nothing—to use my mother’s phrase—had ever come of it. I knew Al was not the kind of man who would let his wife use birth control. I knew Carol desperately wanted to—in her words—give him a baby. I had seen her eyes cloud up with tears during Christmas mass when they read the story of the birth of Jesus; I had seen her light the votives in front of the statue of Saint Jude tucked in the back alcove of the church. So I had felt sorry for her, she who seemed bitter and barren as Rachel, who envied her sister and—as the Bible put it—said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. But now my pity gave way to unfounded envy, and the note of triumph in Carol’s voice made me want to come back at her with some adolescent retort such as So you want a medal or a chest to pin it on? or I know you are, but what am I? And all I could do was stare at the stiff little knitting that hung from her needles—was it booties or a cap or a sweater for her baby?—and feel old and all alone.
“Congratulations,” I said.
“I knew you’d be happy for me.”
“Sure. I’m thrilled. Really, Carol, I’m really thrilled.”
“It’s a boy,” Carol said. “We saw the penis. On the ultrasound. We want you to be his godmother.”
“Sure,” I said. But then I panicked, knowing I would have to go back to Confession before I took on this task, knowing I would have to hold the baby in my arms over the font and hypocritically repeat after the priest, “We renounce the devil and all his works.… ”
“Who’s going to be the godfather?” I asked.
Carol shrugged. She said Al would pick the compare. Clacking her needles, she added, “Unless, of course, you get married in the next few months—”
“Don’t hold your breath,” I said. Although I wanted to turn around right then and drive back to New York, I made a valiant effort to let out some distinctly female gurgles of joy and ask my sister the usual questions about whether she felt nauseated in the morning and when was the due date. Carol was going to deliver at the end of summer.
“God, you’re really far along,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?” “I was afraid I’d jinx it.”
My college anthropology classes had taught me fascination and respect for the superstitions of Australian aborigines and African bushwomen. But the superstitions of my own family—perhaps because they had seeped into my own bones and could not be shaken out—still managed to annoy me. Carol’s fear was irrational, but I understood it all the same.
After I had knocked on the wood of the doorjamb—and my sister lowered her head, where I was afraid she was putting in a quick prayer to the Virgin—Carol set down her knitting needles, stood up, and lifted her shirt to show me her distended stomach.
“Didn’t you used to have an innie belly button?” I asked.
“It’s an outie now.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “Look. It’s moving.”
“Do you want to feel it? Go on, feel it.”
I held my palm against her hard, fish-white stomach and felt a few liquidy ripples.
“He’s a swimmer,” Carol said.
“He’ll like the beach,” I said, my hand perceptibly rising with the gentle lull of the baby’s waves. Then a thud—a punch or a kick—got me right in the palm. “My God, Carol, there’s a riot going on!”
“A swimmer and a boxer.”
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Nah—it’s just like Daddy’s birthday whacks. Harmless stuff”
But my father’s birthday whacks had hurt me more than anyone ever suspected. Although he was an angry man—just like his brother Gianni—Daddy never did more than threaten Carol and me with his open palm and utter between clenched teeth the phrase if you two weren’t girls! to let us know point-blank that if we had been born boys it would have been his delight to land a few good cracks across our sassy faces on a regular basis. Because fathers weren’t supposed to hit daughters, Daddy saved his corporal punishment for his infamous birthday whacks—one smack on the rear for every year on earth. For as far back as I could remember, Birthday Whacks were doled out with prolonged ceremony before the blowing out of candles and the cutting of chocolate cake. Daddy put a halt to whacks when Carol turned twelve and I turned eleven, and in a decade-long display of emotional stinginess that rivaled Mama’s skinflintedness, he never touched either of us again.
Although I knew from reading the Village Voice personal ads that plenty of women liked to be spanked, I wasn’t one of them. On my twenty-fifth birthday I stood there in my father’s house longing for someplace else to call home and for some other man to touch me in a much more loving way. Depressed, I dragged Security Man out to my new car—which no one had yet admired—and parked him in the passenger seat, where he looked like a Middlesex Mental Hospital patient ready to be driven home from a lobotomy. I strapped him in with the safety belt to keep him upright.
After a while Mama came out from behind the garage with her bucket. Two dark circles stained the armpits of her muumuu; her apron ties were hanging loose, and she was sweating so hard her glasses kept falling down her nose and she kept pushing them back up.
“So, your sister tell you the good news?” she asked.
I nodded.
“She said she’d tell you today for your birthday. But don’t say nothing more. Don’t jinx it. I got a feeling it’s a boy—”
“They know it’s a boy, Mama. They had an ultrasound.”
“Bah. I don’t trust the X rays.”
“They saw between its legs.”
“He wants the boy so bad, that Al, he mighta imagined it.”
“What if it turns out a girl?” I asked.
“Nobody’s going to send it back—”
“That’s generous,” I started to say, but my mother overrode me by adding, “—so long as it’s healthy. That’s all we can ask for in life, for good health and the bills to get paid.”
What about all the rest? I wanted to ask her. Didn’t my mother ever want anything more out of life beyond not having to worry about how she would pay for her next bottle of aspirin? But if I asked her, What about love? she’d probably reply, What about it? and if I said, What about happiness? she’d say, Somebody’s unhappy? Tell me who and I’ll say a prayer.
My mother stopped by the side of my Toyota. “You got yourself a nice car here.”
“I’m making more money at this new job. If you need anything—”
She shook her head. “I go
t the social security. But you won’t get none if you don’t get married—”
“I’ll get what I paid into it,” I said. “I pay into social security, and I don’t need a husband to do it for me—”
“You don’t?” Mama asked, and when I opened my mouth to try to explain the system to Mama—she who had never earned a paycheck in her life—she said, “What does it matter where it comes from? Save your money for the day that rains.”
Mama peered into the front seat at Security Man, nodding with approval. “He looks good in there,” she said, and pulled one of the first few dandelion greens, clotted with dirt, from the bucket. “Real. He looks real enough to sink his teeth into one of these cicoria. But you’re right. He needs the pants. I still got a pair of Pop’s that he ordered from the Parade magazine; they never fit him anyway. This guy here can have ’em.”
“How much did you pay for this man?” I asked her.
“Sixty-five.”
I pressed my lips together. “You got ripped.”
“What do you mean, ripped?”
This was where a real mother would pause, where a real mother would say, He’s worth a million bucks—every penny and more—if he keeps my most precious daughter from harm.
Instead, my mother said, “He looked just like Perry Como. I couldn’t resist.”
Chapter Two
Deep-Six
On the following Saturday—just for kicks—I strapped Security Man in the passenger seat. As I gunned my Toyota down to the Ossining train station, I practiced on my partner the bon vivant conversational skills I had tried to master in the city but never quite perfected. I cracked a few lame jokes and even posed a couple of philosophical questions (Why is man mortal? Better yet: Why can’t woman relate to him?), but I elicited nothing more than a stock masculine silence. No matter. Another man soon would arrive to take Security’s place; Dodie was coming from the city to visit me.
When I got to the depot, I found I had misread the nine-point type inside the paper pamphlet that recorded the comings and goings of the Hudson Line. In my eagerness to pick up Dodie, I had looked at the Monday—Friday schedule instead of Saturday’s and had twenty minutes to kill before his train arrived.
I wandered into the station and eyed the vending machines. After a long debate on the pleasures and evils of Milky Ways versus M&M’s, I bit my lip, pinched my side, and moved away to avoid temptation. There were only two things in life I felt I could control: getting fat and getting pregnant. I didn’t want to be either. But for a long time I’d been thinking it would just be easier to have a sex-change operation than to make a lifetime career out of dodging calories and sperm. Men certainly didn’t seem to hold their breath as they stepped upon a bathroom scale and waited for the dial to settle on a disappointingly high number. No man I ever knew had slumped morosely over a copy of Cosmopolitan in the lobby of an abortion clinic, dreading the appearance of a white-uniformed nurse with a clipboard, who would call out his name as callously as bakery clerks called out the next number. Men—or at least the kind of men I went with—got off easy.
These thoughts depressed me, and I went back outside to let the sun lift my spirits. Although suburbia already seemed too dull to sustain me forever, it was a relief to sit outdoors on the wooden bench and stare at the empty tracks without fearing that some nut would creep from behind a pillar and push me into the path of an oncoming train. It felt good to loosen the death grip on my purse and to let my keys jingle idly from my hands. My outfit—Reeboks and denim cutoffs and a man’s T-shirt—hardly would have won any big-city fashion awards, but it felt comfortable. No longer was I an urban animal. I was what my mother called a human bean again.
Dodie alone knew how I had paid my dues in the city; without him, I’d never have survived Manhattan for as long (or as short) as I did. Although we had the same GPA in high school, Dodie (because he was a boy) was allowed to skip a grade, and then (because he wanted to save money—Dodie always had a good head for money) he charged through Duke in three years instead of four. By the time I transferred as a junior to Sarah Lawrence, Dodie already was working for Price Waterhouse, and by then the gap between our experiences seemed enormous. His New Haven had been my New Haven, but his New York was not my New York. I arrived in Bronxville green as a Bartlett pear. I had never eaten a pistachio. Dodie was the one who held the wrinkled red nut out to me for the first time and said, “Go ahead, Lise. It won’t kill you.” It was Dodie who told me that the phrase Catholic taste could be applied to more than just those of us who had suffered through years of catechism and CYO, and Dodie who taught me that jazz was considered cool and that Jaco Pastorius was not a thirteenth-century mystic, but a famous electric-bass player. It was Dodie who trained me not to order a brandy Alexander in the heat of July or a screwdriver in the middle of winter—who, in fact, taught me it was best to avoid these kinds of cocktails altogether. Dodie weaned me away from baby-girl drinks and put me on more-effective substances, such as gin and bourbon. He provided me with dope far smoother than New Haven nickel-bag pot and with the kind of drugs floating around freely in those days: coke and ludes and poppers and once, even, a shot of smack that left me so deluded I lost track of two whole days. But that seemed light-years ago; we had both since regained our fear of intravenous needles.
Dodie taught me how to dress. I arrived at “Sally Larry” (a school known for the gender-impaired) wedded to the Annie Hall look—a man’s 15½ dress shirt dyed purple, a loosely knotted knit tie, baggy olive carpenter pants, pink leg warmers, rubbery green army boots, and on top of everything, a black velvet fedora perched jauntily on my bobbed head. On Dodie’s first visit to my dorm room, he took one look at me and asked, “Are we questioning our sexual identity here?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, Jesus, Lise—you’re all butched out with no place to go. Just get a load of yourself in the mirror.”
But there wasn’t any mirror. My roommate had taken it down, first thing, after plopping her duffel bag on the other twin bed and loudly announcing she was a feminist.
Dodie dragged me down to Canal Jeans in the Village, where we spent hours going back and forth to the coed dressing rooms, Dodie’s cute eyes shining and winking at me above the latticed doors as we tried on black jackets and black T-shirts and black jeans, which we modeled for one another—obviously not so much for the color, but for the cut. And so—banished were my gauze shirts sans bra, the peasant broomstick skirts, and the cuffed Lees. I went into Canal Jean looking like Diane Keaton and came out looking like a dominatrix.
Dodie faux-Manhattanized me, and Sarah Lawrence did the rest of the trick. I put down Albert Camus and picked up Jean Genet. I dropped schifato! and vafanculo! from my vocabulary, and for a few months I even went by my full name—Elisabetta—when I realized some people actually thought it was chic to be Italian—European Italian, that is. I smoked French cigarettes and didn’t even blink when my roommate offered to shave my pubic hair. “No thanks,” I said. “I’d rather hang on to it.”
But much as I liked New York—the museums and the concerts and the bookstores—I never felt at home there. After the dorms in Bronxville I had to move out to my one-room dump in Brooklyn, which was all I could afford on my piddly publishing salary. Only after three stubborn years of sleeping on a mildewed mattress on the floor could I admit to myself that the subway in summer smelled worse than steerage and that all the culture in the world could not make up for the fact that I was living worse than my own mother and father did when they first crossed over to America. So my mother wore a threadbare apron every day in New Haven—how far had I really progressed wearing a black leather skirt (which I could not afford to have cleaned) in a bigger but meaner city? I thought I was living the literary life, but I had not fulfilled the promise I had made to myself on my first visit to New York, when I had pressed my naive thumb inside the ridge of one of the black columns at Scribner’s bookstore (as if it were a holy relic that would inspire me to devote m
yself to the Great God of Language) and swore that someday I would write something wonderful that would be printed on twenty-pound vellum and packaged in cloth binding (with a striking cover, of course), something that made people cry or laugh, a story that pressed on their chest so hard it made them hear their own heartbeat, if only for half a second. Publishing made me sick of words, and when I discovered that every manuscript, no matter how frivolous or serious its subject matter, would be treated as a commodity—just like a slotted spoon, a disposable cigarette lighter, a diamond engagement ring, or a plastic figurine of a saint—I had pitched the scribbled musings and daily journals I scrupulously kept at Sarah Lawrence. Of my two-year career as a poet there, the only opus I now could even recall was a poem with a run-in title. It began:
Fist-fucked by grief …
This choice line was followed by a dramatic, breathless dash à la Emily Dickinson.
Thank God I could not remember the rest.
So I initially embraced Ossining, with its sleepy main street lined with one brick bank and tiny post office and family bakery (all closed on Sunday) that I could visit without feeling like I had to don a costume designed either to make me blend in with the crowd or turn people’s heads. Although I kept all my black clothes in the closet (figuring they might come in handy when I finally hunkered down to write my novel on 1980s corporate life), for my job at Boorman Pharmaceuticals I pulled on sheer pantyhose and navy pumps every morning. I even painted my nails on Sunday evening—not emerald green or raisin black, but a pale, discreet color that made no political statement beyond the fact that I valued good grooming. In Ossining, I told myself, I would pursue a healthier lifestyle—eat more cruciferous vegetables and get a few girlfriends instead of hanging out with just men. Every time I went out with a guy, I told myself, I would put in my diaphragm. So far I had stuck to my promise, at least in regards to the girls and the vegetables. On my first day at Boorman, I lunched with a group of my coworkers from Editorial—all women—in the company cafeteria, which had a nifty salad bar. I liked the combination of crisp spinach leaves, bright green peas, and chopped hard-boiled eggs. The conversation, however, was less than fascinating.
