The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

The room went, finally, silent. Ruin, betrayal, heartbreak, divorce, poverty, despair—and one globe in flames—were forgotten, and all faces turned to me.

  “I’ve always known it,” I continued, trembling, fervent (every one of my mother’s inflections was turning out to be useful). “Now I see—but it’s only just come clear to me. I’m in love with a woman, I love her body, I love making love to her, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I’m proud to be a lesbian.”

  Dolly was looking very confused and Teddy had started repeating his times tables, but I had, for once, my parents’ full attention. Philippa barged into my thoughts, gesticulating wildly in an effort to quiet me, but I showed her the door. I did love and want her, I did … and coincidentally, I wanted to slice my parents up with the very sharpest thing I could find.

  I might have asked: How can you have lied so, all your lives—pretending you knew what you were doing when really you were utterly lost, pretending you watched over your children when your children were watching over you? But this was ever so much more deadly. It said: You don’t know me, in fact you don’t know anything. If you’re disappointed because I love a woman, well then, you’re a small-minded prig, probably a racist, maybe even a Republican. And: Do you really think that anyone who saw your example would be interested in heterosexual love?

  I watched them like an assassin, to be sure my knife had struck the vein. After a few beats—our family equivalent of a long silence—my mother said in her voice of absolute loving tolerance, under which lay the same sentimentality I’d just put to use myself:

  “I believe that love comes to each of us in his own way. How can there be such a thing as a ‘bad’ love?” (This a subject she felt quite strongly about of late.) “No—and even if so, I would never try to dictate my own children’s choices…” Shooting that look that meant: “Unlike Herr Goebbels over there.”

  “We’ll support you in whatever you do, honey, of course,” he said, very quickly so he wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. No, I thought, it didn’t matter whether I was hetero or homosexual, whether I moved to Rome or Detroit, pursued a career as a prostitute or a judge—as long as he didn’t have to see.

  “Follow your heart,” my mother said vaguely, and went off into the night, in pursuit of hers. Teddy sat stunned like the rest of us, watching her go.

  “We’d better get to bed,” Dolly said, as Ma’s headlights swept over the room. “We’ve got to get up tomorrow.”

  Pop broke the fire up with the poker—trying to avoid looking at me, I thought—and the three of them went upstairs quietly, huddled together. I gave them the creeps. But then, I always had. I’d hurt them by going to school, by liking my teachers. When I asked for that yogurt, Ma just knew I was implying that some other, yogurt-eating person was better than she. But I needed to eat yogurt, lots of it, to keep up my strength, because every day there was the quiet pressure—Did I really like school so much that I wouldn’t rather be home with my family? Did I really want to play with those children whose parents no doubt detested Ma, maybe almost as badly as she did them? What if I became like them, what if I broke the magnetic field around our family, and escaped?

  But no simple friendship was going to accomplish such a feat—to do that, to really go beyond them, I needed a much more dangerous force; I needed to fall in love.

  Sylvie had gone home to the trailer—little Springtime needed his walk and she didn’t like to let him out alone because Butchy’s neighbor let his dogs run wild. She’d left Butchy’s leather jacket hanging over the stair rail, and I picked it up and held it as if it belonged to someone I loved terribly, who had died. It was big, to cover the wide shoulders of a man whose body was grown thick from work. It smelled of leather and oil and probably Butch himself, of the strength and safety a man can offer. That man was lost from our lives but he lived in our dreams, like the lost chord.

  The room was dark except for the last embers in the fireplace, and outside, Jupiter was brightening in a band of azure over the crest of the hill. I was seeing this for the last time, and it made me feel strangely light—the empty house, the ruined hopes, the disaster finally upon me. I was young, I was just beginning; if I had nowhere to go, it only meant I could go wherever I liked. I slipped Butch’s jacket on with a thrill, feeling myself tall and solitary, a sailor in a new port—a man, who can move in the world, and so, turn his back on love and walk away. Ma and Sylvie yearned for that man—they were both out hunting him now. Well, I was not going to search for him, pray for him, suffer for him, like they did. I was going to become him.

  Part Two

  One

  MOVING TO Hartford was in no way tantamount to falling off the edge of the earth. Certainly not. I’d never been there, of course. New York was our city of reference, and we had the vague feeling that the roads marked for Hartford might, while not exactly falling off the edge of the earth, lead to a void all the same. No, we (the overweening, familial “we”) did not go to Hartford; therefore I (self-made, rigged up out of bits of yarn and whatever) would move there, make my way in a real place, a place ruled not by a communal fantasy, but by supply and demand. I had about six hundred dollars in the bank, or less, actually, thanks to the Nancy Kissinger shoes. And my father had done some calculations on the back of an envelope, concluding that in Hartford I could get by on a hundred a week, while in New York, I’d need a thousand.

  “No more than a quarter of that for housing, of course,” he’d said, very knowledgeably.

  I’d felt a little spring bubble in my heart then. The advice I’d had from him before was to take smaller steps, smaller bites, speak more softly, keep from raising my hand at school—try, in other words, not to act like the appalling chimera my mother was fashioning me to become. I caused a disturbance at the edge of his mind, and he’d wanted to help me quiet down so he could bear me. But being famished, desperate to get somewhere, and terrified no one would hear me over the general cacophony, I’d been unable to obey his injunctions. I’d disappointed him, he was going away, but in spite of his troubles, he’d stopped to puzzle this out for me. This envelope with his hasty figuring proved his fatherly concern.

  * * *

  “FIRST AND last, and one hundred security,” said my new landlord, whose English was clotted with Polish gutturals, though he’d lived in the U.S. for thirty years. His name was Frank Prysznyrsny (pronounced Pri-sneers-nee), and his wife Henny shadowed us as he showed me the apartment, muttering with worry and suspicion as he demonstrated the makeshift shower and slid the tiny windows up and down in their jambs. Every time he spoke English, she shook her head and gazed heavenward as if ashamed of such affectation, and when I mentioned the lack of radiators, she gave a “pffft!” of disgust and explained in angry sign language how to shut off the front room and move the bed in next to the stove. The place had been their attic, but Frank had painted it (floors, walls, and ceilings, with a vivid aqua enamel that I imagined he’d gotten at a very good price) and put in the bathroom and kitchenette. I was their first tenant. As Frank smoothed the lease for my signature, Henny erupted in a cascade of anxious zh- and y-filled sentences, but he shook his head and hunched his shoulders, making a duck’s back against her.

  “And one hundred dollar, month,” he said with satisfaction. An amount that would have changed his life, if only he’d had it when he was trying to get out of Poland. And which, as it matched exactly my father’s suggestion, gave me a sense of holy rightness that I would, if I’d noticed it, have rejected as superstition.

  But there’s not time in a life to notice so much. As soon as Frank and Henny went away down the stairs, I twirled in the center of the kitchen, arms open and head back, just like a figure skater. Mine, mine, and the floors would always be swept, I’d get a geranium for the window, and behind the bathroom door, there was an ironing board. It was perfect here, perfect, like the places I’d seen out of train windows—modest and striving, with old women gossiping in bursts of evil laughter over the hedges and children on plastic t
ricycles barreling down the sidewalks—not unlike the neighborhood on Staten Island from which my mother had been delivered, to which she longed to return.

  “Oh, I can’t wait for you to see it!” I told her as soon as I got my phone. “There are all these little pasticcerias and delis, and everyone has a vegetable garden in the yard … it’s just, so … real, do you know what I mean?”

  “No,” Ma said, with irritation, reminding me how rude I was to go on like this, with her so lost and sad.

  “So, how are things there?” I asked, nursily solicitous.

  “Fine, Beatrice,” she said caustically. “Never better. I suppose you heard about the accident?”

  “No.”

  “Well, your father ran over a horse.”

  “What?”

  “He ran over a horse.” (So she’d been right, the rabbit was just the beginning, and now he went rampaging through state after state, murdering innocent creatures at will.) “In the middle of the night. Outside Terre Haute, it belonged to some poor child there.”

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  “No, is Pop okay?”

  “Apparently.”

  “And Dolly?”

  There was a long pause so I could ask myself if it was really necessary to torment her by bringing up Dolly, but she decided to be magnanimous.

  “The truck is a total loss,” she said. “But I gather your sister is fine.”

  “Your father” meant “this Nazi I’ve had to prostitute myself with for your sake.” “Your sister”—not good. Pop would have made a very poor Nazi; he couldn’t even bear to hear a mousetrap spring. Instead he’d put a lump of cheese in a milkbottle, propped at an angle. Once the mice were in, they couldn’t skitter out. Then he’d turn them out into the field, and race them back to the house. I looked down at the envelope with his calculations and saw it was stamped FINAL NOTICE. Lucky he had Dolly beside him, I thought.

  * * *

  “BEACHY?”

  The next call was from Dolly’s careful voice, caught between truculence and apology. She’d promised to keep Pop awake by talking, but she’d closed her eyes for a minute and now—oh, if only—of course he’d been exhausted, who wouldn’t be? They’d slept in the barn the night before, they’d been driving eighteen hours, and suddenly …

  “Oh, Beachy, its head came right through the windshield,” she said. “Everything was soaked in blood. I had to throw Raggedy Ann away. I mean, she’s just a doll, I know that, but…” She trailed off, mastered herself, went on. “But the thing is, the insurance expired. I mean, they didn’t give Pop any warning, he just missed one payment, it’s not fair, but they say they won’t pay. We stayed overnight here, we’re going to rent a new truck in the morning—thank God I have my college money.”

  If only they’d hit a deer! A deer would have been okay, but a horse? That’s what happens when things get past control. Bad luck, bad timing, bad judgment, they circle around and around, wrong leading to more wrong until … what? I didn’t want to know.

  And I didn’t have to, I was on my own. That first weekend, I carried home a pizza and a quart of beer and ate on the little, tilting back porch in a heat so harsh and dry, it seemed like a physical force that held even the traffic on Wethersfield Avenue still. At first the only sound was the squeaking of a pulley as the woman across the way took in her laundry—the enormous panties and tiny dresses, the undershirts and pink uniforms and, finally, two sets of canvas overalls. Then the game, Red Sox vs. whoever, came on, and from every house I heard the organ huffing, the laconic announcer ticking off the plays as evening fell. Lucky, so lucky to look over this yard where so many lives feathered into each other, to feel the breeze come up with the darkness, see the backyard vegetable gardens below fade to shapes, beans laced over a teepee of poles, cornstalks in their ranks, tomatoes heavy on their vines. A cat leapt out of a copse of oregano to clap a grasshopper in its paws.

  Then, thunder, and looking west I saw a cloud light up fitfully, as if it had a loose bulb inside. I packed up and went in to unplug things when I realized I could still hear the Red Sox game; the man across the way was not going to let the storm drive him in. He was still sitting beside his radio under the eaves as the first drops began to fall. I hit the screen door open with the flat of my hand and went back onto the porch, smelling the dust as the first drops wet the ground, and also the scent of oregano: the cat must have torn the leaves.

  Suddenly there was an earsplitting thunderclap and the scene was lit so starkly that a brilliant, ashen afterimage burned in my eyes. I’d never seen the way things looked when they were lit up by lightning.

  * * *

  I’D TOLD Frank I had a job, and I meant to get one right away, but I hadn’t counted on Henny and her world of foreboding. She lurked in her kitchen, boiling pierogies, watching the street from behind the curtain as if she expected to see tanks rolling in from the west. As I locked my apartment door, I’d hear her move toward hers, to listen as I passed on the stairs, then she’d go back to the window. And as she didn’t let Frank smoke in the house, he was always on the stoop with his cigarette, waiting for something to happen, someone to walk by.

  So I went off every morning dressed as if I were on my way to work, and didn’t return until five. I’d take the bus up Franklin, and settle into a booth at Louie’s, across the street from City Hall. Even the smells there—black coffee and eggs on a grill—were reassuring. The double doors to the kitchen bubbed open and shut as waiters pushed through with trays held high, to be set clattering on the other side. Glass domes sheltered piles of muffins and crullers for the businessmen in line at the counter. I stood, blessed, among the men in their dark suits with their decisive movements and great energy. Men going to work, going to make a difference in the world.

  Soon, I’d be one of them. I’d bought a red pen to mark the ads I might respond to, and I had twenty résumés on vellum in a special folder. From the wooden phone booth at the back of the room I could dial prospective employers, and in the pink formica ladies’ room I fixed myself in the mirror with the expression my mother used to meet the world—perfect moxie, a challenge: “Strike one spark here and what a blaze you’ll see.” I was looking for work in the same superheated way I’d looked for love; I expected to stumble through some job opening into another life. If I didn’t harness my genetic predisposition to hysteria and put it to some professional use, I was afraid I’d find myself playing “The March of the Toreadors” the way Ma played “Lara’s Theme.” I had to escape myself, to join the rest of the world.

  The man at the next table was drinking black coffee, which proved that strong and able people did not need cream, and I would reveal my foolish weakness by asking for it. I drank. How bitter it was, but it was what real people liked.

  Now the man folded his newspaper in quarters; again, I followed suit, going through job titles—financial assistant, payroll analyst, operations associate, systems coordinator, provider specialist—perhaps more black coffee would clear my head, because I felt like I was reading another language.

  If I’d turned from the classified section to the front page, I might have noticed that unemployment was at a record high. If my father had known the things he’d pretended to, he might have mentioned that I’d have a hard time finding work, with few qualifications and no experience. If I’d had any experience, I might have realized the city of Hartford was dying. I had only ignorance to shield me, but thank heaven it was a very thick and impenetrable ignorance.

  It was eight o’clock—time to cross the street and make my first application. I trembled, fishing out my quarters at the cash register. I was taking too long at it; real people had their change ready or threw a few dollars on the counter and went their way. There were two men behind me, with jobs to get to. The cashier counted the coins I’d dumped into his hand and returned two nickels, squinting at me with irritation. He knew I was an impostor.

  The City Hall personnel office had me fill
out a form and take a standardized test: my two best skills. There were sharpened pencils, little round circles to be carefully blackened in, a monitor who tap-tapped purposefully around the room, and who explained, once we’d finished, that the tests would be scored the very minute they lifted the hiring freeze.

  So, on to the Gold Building, fifty stories high, its windows mirrored in gold instead of the common silver so it could be touted by the Chamber of Commerce as “the centerpiece of the Hartford Renaissance.” The elevator went up along the front of the building so you could look out over the brave little city with its puffed-out chest and boarded-up storefronts, across the river which had none of the legendary might of rivers and just flowed humbly along as if it understood it wasn’t needed anymore. On the thirty-seventh floor a pale man with small glasses and gray teeth shook his head in sympathy as he read my résumé over.

  “Oscar Wilde and the Flowering of Decadence in the Fin-de-Siècle,” he read. “What an interesting subject.” I was afraid he was going to pat my hand, so sadly did he peer at me. “Not terribly helpful in the financial services industry, though. Do you follow the stock market?”

  “No,” I said, feeling very small. No doubt I was supposed to thank him and go, but I couldn’t quite get myself to move. I looked over at him with what must have been naked avarice, because he said suddenly “Here, have one of our pens.”

  Having got me to stand up, he took pity.

  “Have you thought of word processing? That would be the thing, I think, for someone of your background.” Now he was cheerful, buoyant, even, jumping up to shake my hand. “Word processing. It’s a coming field, just the thing for you.”

  To apply as a cocktail waitress, I wore the push-up bra Philippa had favored and the lowest-cut sweater I could find—in the mirror I saw the quintessential tough chick with a heart of gold. I’d move with quick grace between the tables, offering a smile to the regulars, who would love and confide in me, take comfort in the sight of me. When I tried this smile on the manager of The Inner Sanctum, a long, low place with flocked red velvet walls and an undulant bar, he looked into my eyes to see if my pupils were dilated. “I’ll give you a call,” he said, looking over my shoulder out the door.