Pearl

by Mary Gordon

  Pearl allows Mariposa to touch her hair.

  This is how Pearl and Luisa become friends. Luisa knocks Mariposa to the ground one day and says, “Leave her fucking hair alone, you fucking little freak.” The director takes the three children into her office and asks Pearl if she minds Mariposa playing with her hair, and Pearl says, “It doesn’t matter,” which makes Luisa furious all over again. The director, Maria’s boss (who she thinks is an idiot), suggests that Luisa needs to learn other choices than inappropriate language and might need a time-out.

  That night, Pearl cuts her hair off, liking the sound the scissors make, liking her hair in a pile on the floor, more pleased with it there than on her head. And her mother comes into the room, begins to cry, stops herself, holds Pearl’s head against her breast. “My poor little lamb,” she says. “My poor shorn lamb.”

  . . .

  Perhaps Maria might have made wiser choices. Seen to it, for example, that Pearl had some experiences—if only in the summer—of the wilderness, the woods. A garden of her own. Maria told herself that Pearl was quiet and reserved and did not demand from her (this was a mercy) a more outgoing approach to classroom life. But she didn’t see, until Pearl was eleven, that her daughter might have done better in a smaller, quieter classroom, where little Amanda and little Oliver might inflict spiritual harm but probably spoke in lower tones and might not be so prone to pocket loose change or desirable accessories. It took Maria a while to give up her dream of public school education, but when Pearl was twelve she did see, finally, that her daughter wasn’t thriving and arranged for her to take the test for the Watson School, a private girls school on the Upper East Side. They were eager to have her. Maria arranged for Luisa to be tested too. She was accepted on scholarship. Maria could therefore convince herself that she had bleached the experience of the stain of privilege. Pearl never imagined that the stain was lighter than it was, and Luisa, who flourished at Watson, resented it as well and rails to this day (from her Harvard dormitory room) about the fucking white girls and the fucking old-maid teachers who taught her the Latin she adores and majors in, picketing the administration building in support of the creation of a major (good for others but not herself) in ethnic studies.

  Luisa Ramirez, who loves Pearl fiercely, felt her always in need of protection. She did not like Maria, hated that Maria believed she understood Luisa’s parents, thought it a sacrilege that Maria should even speak of an experience she had no knowledge of. Maria and Luisa: similar in nature, forceful, loving Pearl, who from childhood had disliked and feared even the idea of force. Feeling herself a person of no force, except, now, in this one act: her forceful death.

  Things would happen to Pearl that gave her an inkling of a kind of life she knew she was protected from, but which, she feared, was truer than the version created by her mother. These things all involved random malignity, so it is possible to say that as a child she was distressed by a pattern she inchoately perceived, which she believes now has come together in a truth that makes room for no other. That demands her death. But she was very young when she began to be distressed by things she saw, so distressed that she believed the floor of the world was breaking through. She would feel herself falling. Then the world, or her mother, would catch her. Now nothing has broken her fall. But the experience of falling: this is something she has known for as long as she can remember.

  Pearl saw things in the apartment building where she lived all her life. She knew that it was a very nice apartment building, a fortunate apartment building, and that the people in it were very nice. So the fact that terrible things could happen there made her even more distressed. For example, what happened to Miss Alice Stevenson, the year Pearl was six.

  I am going to tell you the story of Miss Alice Stevenson to explain what Pearl calls her witnesses; it is their faces that appear behind her eyes, cut out against cold blue, telling her she is right to do what she is doing. That is why I tell these stories: so you can see the faces Pearl is seeing.

  Miss Alice lived in the same building as Maria and Pearl. She took in typing. Pearl and Maria met Miss Alice when Maria gave Miss Alice her thesis to type when Pearl was three. She always called herself Miss Alice, and that’s what she wanted to be called. She loved Maria and Maria found her interesting. Maria was always saying she liked people on the edge; she said they had imagination. Often these people frightened Pearl. She thought her mother didn’t see their desperation, and this frightened her too: what her mother didn’t or wouldn’t see. When she was older and had the words for what had been a feeling, she wanted to say to her mother, What you call lively I call chaotic. But she never did, because she knew how much it would cause her mother to give up.

  Miss Alice always wore identical short-sleeved striped knit dresses, with the zipper down the front, the handle of the zipper a small metal circle that just begged to be humiliatingly pulled down. She never wore stockings, even in winter. And never shoes or boots, only sneakers—Keds—white or black. She had a dog named Clancy. Both had underbites. Both of them had hair that was curly and unkempt. They really did look alike.

  Miss Alice walked Clancy six or seven times a day. He peed every two or three feet. You didn’t like thinking about his penis, but you couldn’t help it.

  On her kitchen wall, Miss Alice had pasted pictures of movie stars cut out of Sunday supplements. Next to the pictures were letters she’d typed and signed.

  Dear Miss Alice, thank you for the wonderful typing. Elizabeth Taylor.

  Dear Miss Alice, it’s always such a pleasure working with you. Charlton Heston.

  Dear Miss Alice, you saved my life this time. Woody Allen.

  Miss Alice was never separated from her dog. She made the dog crazy. It wasn’t that Clancy was vicious. It was simply that he did not know rest. She wouldn’t let him alone. If he was lying down, trying to sleep, she’d rattle a box of Milk-Bones till he barked, and then she’d break one of the Milk-Bones in six pieces and throw them and he’d catch them in his mouth: one, two, three, four, five, six catches for each little chunk. Sometimes he’d bark for no reason. Then Miss Alice would give him a Milk-Bone. Then she’d complain about his barking. Maria would say, “Don’t give him a treat when he barks; you’ll encourage him.” Miss Alice liked Maria, but she didn’t listen to her; she didn’t listen to anyone about Clancy. She’d say, “Oh, he’s used to it by now, it’s our game.”

  As Clancy got older, he started peeing in the hall. Just a few drops, but Miss Alice never cleaned it up. This infuriated one of the other tenants, a German woman, Mrs. Habermas. She was a very tidy woman, Mrs. Habermas. She often looked furious. Have you noticed how that is with very tidy people? At Christmastime, she’d bring Maria and Pearl cookies, but Pearl was always afraid to eat them.

  When Clancy peed in the hall, Mrs. Habermas would knock furiously on Miss Alice’s door. Pearl could hear her knocking, shouting, complaining about the dog. “Filthy, filthy!” she would shout. Pearl was frightened. Maria would say, “They’ll get tired of it,” but Pearl knew they wouldn’t. Or Mrs. Habermas wouldn’t. And, in fact, Pearl was right.

  Miss Alice shouted back at Mrs. Habermas through the apartment door. She kept calling Mrs. Habermas a Nazi and saying she had no intention of going into a concentration camp. One night, Mrs. Habermas knocked on the Meyerses’ door. “She’s making our beautiful building filthy, filthy.” When Mrs. Habermas said the word filthy her face changed shape; she wanted to hurt Miss Alice. Maria wanted Mrs. Habermas to know she would not allow it. Maria told Mrs. Habermas to leave; Miss Alice was an unfortunate soul and needed help, not persecution. From then on, Mrs. Habermas counted the Meyerses among her enemies. She divided the building up into allies and enemies. It was war. And Miss Alice did have her enemies, because of Clancy. He did bark all the time, and he did pee in the hall.

  Everyone knew it was Mrs. Habermas who called the IRS. It seems that Miss Alice never paid income tax. How did Mrs. Habermas find that out, the cunning of the hunter? Maybe sh
e just took a chance. She reported Miss Alice for conducting a business from her apartment.

  Miss Alice wouldn’t open the door for the IRS. She screamed at them like she screamed at Mrs. Habermas. Pearl was very frightened. She was only six when all this happened.

  Miss Alice had had a little something once, and she lost it. It was taken from her. Pearl could see she had become a hunted person. Soon after the IRS came, Clancy died. I don’t know if that was Mrs. Habermas’s fault. I don’t know how she could have made it happen; Miss Alice never let Clancy out of her sight. Pearl didn’t know whether Mrs. Habermas was responsible for Clancy’s death, but she knew that the kind of hate Mrs. Habermas felt could result in death, even if she didn’t know how, and this frightened her. She thought her mother didn’t understand; she knew she couldn’t ask her mother if Mrs. Habermas’s hate had made Clancy die, because her mother would say, Of course not, don’t think that way, don’t think of things like that; let’s just think of something to do for Miss Alice to make her feel better. But Pearl knew that Miss Alice had lost everything she once had, and because her mother didn’t understand that, she no longer felt as safe with her mother as she did before.

  Pearl was eight when the incident with Janet Morehouse and the super happened, another incident in the building.

  Janet and Maria met while Maria was pregnant. Janet had always wanted a baby but believed she didn’t have the strength to raise a child on her own. Maria incorporated her into her project—the project first of having Pearl on her own, then raising her. Maria believed it would be good for everyone. Perhaps it was.

  Janet designed and made clothes. She liked clothes with very special details—French seams, covered buttons—that no one she knew well could afford. So she made ends meet doing upholstery and slipcovers and sometimes just altering clothing and making hems. The apartment was always full of fabrics, and sometimes Pearl enjoyed that, losing herself in colors and textures for whole afternoons. But sometimes Janet’s apartment just upset her. There were too many things, things in the wrong places. When you sat on her couch, pins stuck out of the burgundy velvet cushions. There were lots of ashtrays with dirty tissues in them, though Janet didn’t smoke. Pennies, turning green, were stuck to the glass top of the coffee table. A withered balloon on a long stick was shoved into a dusty blue glass vase.

  One day, Pearl and Janet were dancing. Pearl was still quite young; I think she must have been five. Janet had made a cape of magenta silk for Pearl and a violet one for herself. She had bought Pearl Hawaiian Punch as a special treat; it was the sort of small transgression she allowed herself. Maria didn’t approve of drinks with such a high sugar concentration, but Janet knew Pearl liked the color, and she liked to think of herself as a naughty aunt. She put some music on, maybe Palestrina, and they were dancing, twirling their capes. And then Janet knocked over the glass of Hawaiian Punch with the corner of her cape. It spilled onto a stack of paper and made a magenta-colored pool that didn’t seep into the stack. The two of them stood looking at it for a while, unable to think what to do. Then Pearl began to wipe at it with the corner of her cape (which was the same color as the Hawaiian Punch—that was part of the fun), but Janet said, “No, that’s no good,” and Pearl knew she was right nothing was any good, nothing they could think of would do the slightest bit of good. What did they do then? Maybe just stood there and waited for Maria.

  The super hated Janet. He wanted to hurt her. He was a terrible man, everyone knew that. He was a drunk and he lived alone in the basement. He could have fixed anything if he wanted to—but he often didn’t. On the nights he dressed up to go out, he’d put on a lot of heavy gold jewelry and a blond Beatles wig (he was bald without it) and then he’d drive his Cadillac, loud, up the street.

  He liked Maria but, as I said, he hated Janet. He’d never do anything for her. Or if he did, he made it worse than before. Her toilet never worked right. You always had to flush it three or four times. He tried to convince her it was her fault, saying she must be “putting something funny down there.” For a few minutes she’d try to convince him that it wasn’t her fault, but then she’d give up. If Pearl was in the apartment, he was a little better. Janet tried to get the super to come when Pearl was there because she knew he didn’t want Maria to know he’d acted badly. Pearl heard Maria telling Janet once that she always let him think she might just make her way to the basement for a little smooch. She said she had to keep that possibility in mind, but make him believe it was pretty unlikely. That’s the kind of line Maria always seemed able to walk. It was the kind of thing that frightened Pearl. Suppose her mother couldn’t get away from Mr. Murcherson? Suppose he took her to the basement and she couldn’t get away?

  One night, Janet was doing her laundry in the basement. Usually the super locked the laundry room at ten, but that night he wanted to lock up at nine-thirty and Janet wasn’t finished. She told him she had another half hour. He told her she’d leave when he said she’d leave. When she stood her ground, he turned the lights off and locked the door. Janet was locked in the dark cold room all night. She banged and banged on the door and no one heard her. Or maybe the super heard her and he didn’t care. Maybe he was glad.

  At six the next morning, he unlocked the door but didn’t open it. Pearl had a cold the next day and couldn’t go to school, and when Maria took her down to stay with Janet, Janet was sitting on the couch in a daze, like she’d been beaten.

  Pearl saw her mother moving very fast, the way Janet never could. She called the center and said she’d be half an hour late, and told her assistant ten things to do. Then she ran down to the super’s apartment in the basement and made him apologize to Janet. This frightened Janet; she felt she’d pay for it in the long run. Maria said of course she wouldn’t.

  Nothing really changed, but Maria felt something had changed, that she’d made something happen. Pearl felt her mother didn’t understand. She knew something her mother didn’t know: that some things were hopeless. There were some things no one could do anything about. The super would always want to hurt Janet, because he could, just as Mrs. Habermas called the IRS on Miss Alice because she could.

  All her life, after these two stories, fourteen years of life in the case of Miss Alice, twelve in the case of Janet, these stories have come to Pearl when she’s been tired or discouraged or just sad, and when they came they suggested to her that they were the truest things about the world. But although she always knew they were there in the background, she was capable of being newly shocked, as she was when her mother told her John Lennon had been killed by someone who was jealous of him. From the time she was a baby, her mother would dance with her to the Beatles. “All You Need Is Love.” Her mother would lift her up, the two of them laughing, Pearl and Maria both singing at the top of their voices: “Love is all you need!” But sometimes her mother would spin her too fast, and she got dizzy and the moons came in front of her eyes; stripes of light crisscrossed each other and she wanted to say, Stop, Mama, stop, the floor’s going upside down. But sometimes she liked the moons and the crisscrossed lights and wanted the floor to go upside down.

  One day, when Pearl was nine, she and Maria were dancing to the Beatles, dancing as partners now: Maria could no longer, would no longer, spin Pearl off the floor. It was a clear cold day in December; the light fell on the wooden floor in thin hard bars. Maria started crying because it was the anniversary of John Lennon’s death and told her about Mark David Chapman. Pearl was only nine but her mother thought she believed in not keeping things from her, although in fact she kept many important things from her daughter. But she did not keep from Pearl the story of John Lennon and Mark David Chapman. Mark David Chapman, unloved, ungifted, reading The Catcher in the Rye alone, wanting to erase the loved face so his face would be, as it has become, unerasable.

  I don’t want to suggest that Pearl was miserable all the time. Many things gave her great joy. Her dog, Lucky, rescued from the pound, part yellow Lab, part something unidentifiable: her boo
n companion, absorber of dread, tears, anguish, and, later, mother-directed rage. She and Maria and Lucky would run in Riverside Park, and then, when Pearl became a better runner than her mother (this happened when she was thirteen and Maria forty-three), she and the dog would run from 120th Street far, far downtown and back. Run along the river, the light enchanting in all seasons—metallic or powdery or a fall of silver—and her breath and the dog’s breath going in, going out, their hearts pounding and relaxing in the New York air. Maria and Joseph and Devorah rented cottages at the sea: on Cape Cod, at the Jersey shore. Pearl loved swimming with her dog, with her mother, with Luisa, because most years Luisa was invited along. The two of them would take long, tiring swims that folded into sweet restoring afternoon sleeps on screened porches or in white beds where the sun fell straight onto the pillows, warming their cold cheeks, their still wettish hair. For many years Maria and Pearl shared a vivid joy in bodily life, and Maria was good at thinking up treats: going for ice cream could become an event, a trip onto the roof of a summer evening. Their bodies enjoyed many of the same things: running, swimming, eating, dancing. Pearl had no important friends other than Luisa but their connection was constant, electric. They studied together; they discussed the world, their souls: who they were, who they were in the process of becoming. Pearl had boyfriends—brutes or dolts, they would be called in retrospect—and in their senior year she and Luisa decided they should lose their virginity before college, which they unceremoniously did, primarily in order to discuss it with each other. She had, properly speaking, never been in love.