by Rhoda Lerman
“Stephanie, do you have a few minutes to spare?”
Part of my dysfunction was not to trust, but the other part was not to care, so I didn’t respond with the usual sharpness. Besides, she had worked her job and mine all these weeks while I doodled, daydreamed and vaguely planned activities for her. Also I had ignored her. At any rate, she hid a flashy gold and magenta gift box behind her back.
“Oh, poor Sissy. You’ve really been working, haven’t you. Sit down.”
“Well, Stephanie, you see . . .” she started, quite uncomfortable, the package stabbing her in the lower back. “My mother and father . . . they were married.”
“I never questioned that, Sissy.”
“What I mean is, I see that you and this Richard character are really going to get married, at least it sure looks like you’re on the winning team and I want you to know I’m rooting for you. Not that I believe in marriage . . . in your sense . . . but if that’s what you want, I sure want you to win, Stephanie. I sure do.”
“Thank you.”
“Well, it’s not just that. I think, well, look, my mother, she was pretty overt. You know. She’d insist on a kiss and a hug from my father and I think she nearly attacked him in bed. And he was passive. She’d always grab his tush when he walked by her and I never saw it but I’m sure she grabbed him all over, you know? She always teased him and turned him on and attacked him. But he loved it. He loved getting attacked.”
Sissy was helping me. She was decent. “Did you ever notice if she insulted him?”
“More like challenging him. She would say at supper with a smile, a look, just for him, ‘I guess you’re too tired to go to bed early, huh, Frank?’ I never figured that remark out till much later. Until now, really, when I was trying to think of what you . . . well, if you, if I could help you somehow. So, look, I brought you this.” She swung the box to me. She was very embarrassed and very real. God knows what was in the box. I hoped I could say the right thing. The box was from Blackton–Fifth Avenue. No way would it work with the Louis Vuitton and the Daniel Hechter.
“That’s the kind of thing my mother always used,” Sissy said as I opened the papers to a G-string triangle of hot green and yellow felt with gold and fuchsia spangles spelling SUPERWOMAN across the crotch and two cones spiraling with the same colors in bangles, no more than an inch in diameter, lovingly wrought, striptease items. I didn’t even know the name for them. They were so cheap and in such bad taste and yet I knew how hard it was for her to do. It was beyond my imagination to imagine Sissy shopping in Blackton’s. But she had. For me.
“Oh, Sissy, they’re . . . they’re so sexist. I love you.”
“I hope they work.”
“I’m so touched, Sissy. I am very touched.”
“Christ,” she dropped her voice. “Men are so stupid. You must have to draw them pictures. Somebody’s gotta work around here. I gotta go. I suppose they’ll fit,” she added with a lecherous grin. “I’d love to see them on you.”
“Sissy . . .” I began to scream at her. And then I spread my arms out, quite empty. “Sissy . . . it’s just the way it is. That’s all. Thank you.”
“Come down and look over the blueprints later, will you?”
“Sure.”
It was the closest we had ever been. She buzzed me on the intercom before she left for the day with a small sociological commentary. “Listen, another thing, my mother told me that Jewish guys don’t marry girls who swallow.”
“That’s wonderful of you, Sissy. That is extraordinarily important data. And how is Monica?”
“Yeah. See, I care about your problems. That’s the first time you’ve asked in almost a month.”
“I’m sorry.” I walked out to her desk. “How’s it going?”
“It’s okay. See, we are making new rules so no one knows what to expect. You at least know the rules.”
“Don’t like them. Know them.”
“Well.” She wanted me to talk to her and I did owe her something. Primarily, I owed her some attention. She had been carrying the responsibility of the cross exhibit entirely by herself, covering for my three-hour lunch dis appearances, and caring for me. I sat on a corner of her desk. “Sissy, I always wondered how you know when you meet a girl whether or not. I can usually tell with men.”
“Oh, Monica was simple. She walked up to me at the movies and said ‘Let’s take a walk.’ ”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that. Listen, I hope this all works out.” After she left, I slipped the blazing gift into my bag. Just like that. It wasn’t quite just like that at Westport. It was pretty awful in fact. And I couldn’t blame it on Sissy altogether.
15
THE CLOSER WE CAME TO WESTPORT, THE MORE CONSTRICTED RICHARD became. He tried to whistle and then stopped trying. He tried to hum. He tried to find something on the radio. Station after station, nothing pleased him. And then we arrived at the barn which had been a barn but was no longer a barn. It was now an exquisite home set behind boxwood and mulberry with only the shell of the original New England indicating its humble beginnings. The folks inside spoke with a strange combination of Port Jervis and Boston accents with “fuck” sprinkled like sea salt throughout. The mother and daughter must have been at one time very short. Now they wore six-inch platforms that stilted them far above the father and son, the sort of shoes cripples wear one at a time to even up a stunted leg. But the mother and daughter, Blossom and Pamela, wore the shoes two at a time and towered over everyone. Both children, although they had perfect complexions and shining rows of braces, blinked constantly and uncompromisingly. And Pussycat, the father of them all, was wonderfully, neurotically overweight; expansive and generous and perspiring with no apologies, a good man. Mark, the son, was neurotically underweight and much shorter than everybody else and kept saying he was getting nervous. And because everyone was so ill-bred, a pair of perfect Borzois licked their feet. Good breeding, I decided, was to be free to buy your dogs at the ASPCA.
Blossom, still as lovely as her wedding picture, thin, stunning, her nails—toes and fingers—polished in deep red, showed me the barn. The stone walls of the kitchen and family room were certainly barn and the high beams and rough woods of the next three floors were certainly barn. But the bookcases—all book-club editions—and the French windows and the Chinese carpets and stainless stairwells and rosewood lofts in the bedrooms were not barn.
“Hey, Little Mother,” Pussycat bellowed upward and the stainless steel spirals shivered. “Get down here and feed everybody.” I would, he explained, see the rest of the house later.
The evening wasn’t bad. The family wasn’t bad. They all cared and touched each other. Blossom was still angry with Richard about the Beef Wellington and the Bing and Grøndahl china that first weekend when I lied about my ankle and we didn’t continue on to Westport. So she (her words) ordered out and we had (her words) chinx. I didn’t mind. I was thinking more and more about that G-string over a flat belly as I picked delicately over the chow mein and assorted exotics. We ate and watched Mothra, a Japanese sci-fi movie about an enormous moth who wipes out airports. Mark could do an excellent Mothra death scene and did it often throughout the movie. Blossom wanted to know how old my Louis Vuitton was. I told her I couldn’t remember. Pussycat stretched out monstrously as he asked what made me choose a little guy like Richard. Mark repeated Mothra’s death howl with no variations while all of us ate from the cardboard canisters and cuddled near each other on the family room sofas. Pamela wanted to know what kind of perfume I wore, what kind of lipstick, what kind of eye underliner, where I bought my shoes, did I douche or use the pill or wear a device and all the other normal questions of the contemporary fifteen-year-old woman. She wore a device and most of her friends did. A couple were still on the pill. Fifteen, I thought, moving closer to Richard, who became stiffer, fifteen and probably starting at thirteen. And I was almost thirty and not allowed. I cuddled next to Richa
rd, rubbing my forehead against his shoulder. Mark had him nailed on the other side and, between us, Richard couldn’t move.
I cuddled harder and began to think with greater clarity of intention about my superwoman G-string. Richard was very withdrawn although he tried to be avuncular and tender equally to Mark and myself. That night Richard would be sleeping in the family room. I was to be in Pamela’s room on the second floor. The master bedroom, well out of earshot, was on the third level. I never found out where it was Mark slept but he looked as if he never slept. Actually, as it happened, that night he was around quite a bit. But then, so was I.
Before intermission ended Pussycat was out and back with hot fudge sundaes in more canisters. Mothra gave her death scream. Mark his, surpassing hers. Happy ending. Pussycat stretched toward me again, a huge round lion, belched, smiled at his belch, and measured me for a take-out treat in a cardboard canister. He wasn’t lecherous. He was just a hungry man. Blossom took me aside as the kids punched off the tv set.
“Listen, Steph, after everyone’s settled down, it’s okay with us if you want to come down here with Richard. Just don’t let him come up to Pammy’s room. And listen, can I borrow that T-shirt for lunch next week? I’ll mail it back. The girls will drop dead.”
Pamela, lacking the finesse of her mother’s generation, whispered with equal generosity, “If you two are gonna ball, don’t get any come on my sheets.”
And Pussycat led me upward to Pamela’s bedroom while Blossom did the dishes, an interpretation of an act manifested as burning the cardboard in the incinerator. Pussycat brushed me as we walked up the stainless stairs. I climbed faster and faster because every time I slowed down I could feel his chest, stomach, something, against my backside. If there had been more stairs, I am certain he would have had a heart attack. I didn’t wish it on him but then I didn’t wish him on me.
He opened the door to Pamela’s room.
“Good God!,” I hadn’t meant to say. Now I understood Blossom’s and Pamela’s anxiety about the sheets. The bedroom out-Bloomingdaled Bloomingdale’s. The walls were patchwork, the sheets were patchwork. The spread, the dust ruffle, the padded rocker were patchwork. The towels were patchwork. The ceiling was patchwork and the floor was stenciled in patchwork and covered with forty thousand coats of shellac.
“It’s something else, isn’t it?” Pussycat, exhausted, laid my suitcase at my feet. “And you know that fucking kid of mine. She comes in after the decorator and four carpenters finish and says, ‘But where’s the straw rope on the bed? I wanted a rope bed. How can you have a patchwork room without a straw rope bed!’ Can you imagine that?”
Pamela was a natural. She’d never need a Daniel Hechter or a Vuitton.
“Listen,” Pussycat was still breathing hard. “Should I look in on you so you don’t get in trouble? Maybe I should lock you in. Hey, let me know if you get in trouble. I mean, if you need help. These young guys. You gotta draw them fucking pictures, for Christ’s sake.”
I watched him blush. “I’m sorry, Pussycat, I didn’t hear you. Could you say that again?”
He repeated himself unevenly, the great blush rising and fanning out across his great face. It was the third time I had been advised that Richard needed a picture drawn for him. Didn’t they know about the other woman? As I closed my door on Pussycat and climbed into my four-poster and lay knee-deep in Jewish Appalachia, I began to fantasize about green and gold and fuchsia-spangled peak moments in the family room.
The house was very still. Freezers buzzed, pumps sumped or sumps pumped, the incinerator hissed away. Richard slept below me, troubled, I knew, and withdrawn. It wasn’t easy for him to be with his family and he felt shame and pressure. He was only a half flight down the spiral staircase on softly carpeted steps and I thought about him and about my blazing superwoman G-string and drawing pictures and Sissy’s father and mother and finally, applying my spirals and triangle that glowed quite wickedly in the dark, I slipped into my robe and out to the hallway, patting my way along the wall, intrigued by my own luminosity. Once I thudded against a velvet Borzoi who groaned. When I found Richard in the family room, I slipped off my robe, laid it at the bottom of the sofa and touched Richard’s forehead.
“Richard?” I whispered softly. No answer. I patted my way down to his chest. I put my hands on his face quite gently. Awake or not, he allowed me to lift his blankets although first I had to break his fingers because he clutched the satin hems so tightly. He allowed me to slip one leg in beside him. He breathed steadily. I didn’t trust him. I knew he was awake.
“Richard?”
And then he screamed. A karate scream, a Mothra death scream, a lion wounded, and I had time only to leap backward.
“What are those lights? Help! Help!”
I was about to accuse him of faking, of sounding too much like Tevye’s wife but Blossom and Pussycat and the two Borzois and Mark and Pamela were with me in my luminous shame and the lights went on like a surprise party. Nobody sang happy birthday. The two Borzois had been in the den. I had tripped on Mark.
“S-U-P-E-R . . . superwoman, it says. It says superwoman. Boy, am I getting nervous. I’m getting really nervous, Mama.”
I glazed my eyes over and stood very still.
“Blossom,” Richard said sanely and appropriately. “Take your children away. I’ll take care of this. She’s obviously sleepwalking.”
“Why don’t you keep her down here, then, so she doesn’t get loose again?”
“Shh, don’t wake her up. She gets very upset if you wake her up and she’ll know what she did.”
There I stood with Richard defending me, my eyes glazed, my blazing shameful triangle and tits glowing obscenely in the family room. Richard was wise. I must offer him that. “Just let her out. Just open the doors and let her go. Stand out of her way.”
I simply turned, keeping my eyes wide and frozen, and passed beyond the family with my outstretched arms, up the spiral stairs and into the room of the princess. I heard the door lock from the outside. When I climbed into bed, I wanted to die. When I woke up in the morning, I wanted to murder Richard. Choke him with the G-string. There was no need for him to scream.
But the scream that came shivering up into my sleep wasn’t Richard’s. It was Mark’s froggy deep voice bursting frantically up the spiral staircase, covering quite well my own crisis with his own crisis. “There isn’t one fucking package of Froot Loops in this whole fucking house and I’m getting very nervous.”
“Mark!” Blossom yelled from the third floor, “is that you?”
And Pamela from nearby: “Who the hell else do you think that could be?” Bitchy lady.
And Pussycat. “Isn’t your Uncle Richard down there? Ask him to find you something to eat.”
Blossom began a strange liturgy I would hear repeated many times on our visits to come. “There’s Cap’n Crunch and Grape-Nuts and Grape-Nuts Flakes and Chocula and Heartland with nuts or plain and instant oatmeal, with the cinnamon and apples like you like, and frozen waffles. . . .” She continued while something heavy and large and loving stumbled down the staircases, slammed a screen door, tore out of the white chip driveway with a screech of Lincoln brakes, and, some few minutes later, brought back the Froot Loops. The crisis was over. I buried my head in the patchwork. No wonder Richard was scared of marriage and commitment. This is what he had seen and poor Mark is whom he might have been. And he wanted to lose himself anyplace but back in that scene again. Mark’s anger was of course unmitigated ultimate terror, and it was why Pussycat, who understood the terror as only a man can, kind and fumbling, nearly fell down the stainless stairs to get those Froot Loops. Mark’s life as a man would start only soon enough. My Richard, for whom I felt pain that morning, was also in terror. Of me, of marriage, of the whole thing. Richard didn’t have to be governor or wear the right ties or drive the right car. God, I so wanted that morning to hold Richard and tell him he didn’t have to, that I knew his pain and his fear and I’d always have the Froo
t Loops for him. But I couldn’t. The girl at the piano was the Froot Loop distribution center. I gave out the terror. I wanted to get married and I couldn’t give out Froot Loops. I had to keep him frightened.
Draping the superwoman G-string on one post of Pamela’s bed and sticking the pasties on the tops of two other posts, I packed to leave with Richard. The family was so embarrassed for Mark I was able to be gracious and forgiving over a standup breakfast of chocolate-laden coffee cake and real coffee. When I left, Blossom kissed me and whispered: “I’ll be around if you have problems. I know him like a glove.”
Glove and I did not communicate on the way home. Glove said things like: “An hour more.” “Did you see that Lotus?” “Do you want to stop at a powder room?”
I said things like “How far is it now?” “No, I didn’t.” “No, I don’t.”
And when we reached my apartment and pulled up to the curb and he reached into his overnight case and gave me my Very Well Folded Robe which I had last seen the night before through glazed eyes at the bottom of the family room sofa, I said, “You didn’t have to scream.”
“I was scared. You honestly scared me, Stephanie. You get into my right hemisphere too fast.” His eyes were the same solemn gray-flecked sincere eyes I had first loved. He touched the sides of my mouth. His lips twitched ever so slightly. “Listen, let’s write in the little book again. I can plan ahead the next three weeks but after that the schedule changes. No weekends, though. They’re tied up. Then in July we can plan on some weekends together.” He drew little circles on my hand thoughtfully. “Isn’t it strange how we’re still planning dates when I feel as if I’m already married to you?”
I was back to my old responses. “Oh, Richard.” What the hell was wrong with weekends? When he had tucked the datebook away and pulled my luggage from the trunk and waved good-bye and roared off into the traffic toward her, I didn’t like him at all. I didn’t like his eyes or his lips or his hands or his twitch or his datebook. I didn’t like him leaving me on the street corner. Of course he felt married to me. I was acting like a wife, reminding him to wash his hands when he went to the men’s room, talking about Piatigorsky when he whistled Bacharach, pointing out to him that his shoelaces were fraying, his knees were stretching, his eyelids had a trace of dandruff. Not because he was comfortable with me did he think of me as wife. But because he was uncomfortable with me. What a thankless victory the weekend had been.
