eleven
Sun was streaming through the windows when Coco opened her eyes. She twisted around to avoid the reproachful light and recapture her unconsciousness, but a musty odor of sex rose from the crossly wrinkled sheets, and a spurt of dark memories raced through her.
“Gavin. Wake up.” She began to shake him frantically. It seemed as if a full-blown nuclear attack of hysteria was upon her, and she needed some deterrent—heavy hardware or a defense shelter—to protect her from the approaching holocaust.
“What time is it?” Gavin moaned.
“It must be late. Look at the sunshine.”
He unlocked himself slowly but purposefully to the day, rubbing sleep out of his narrowly opened eyes. Then he sat up, fully intact and invulnerable, to feel around on the radiator for his glasses so he could read the alarm clock. “Jesus Christ, Coco,” he groaned. “It’s only seven o’clock. It’s Saturday, for Christ’s sake. I’m tired. I don’t want to get up yet.”
“Oh, I didn’t know it was so early,” Coco apologized. “I’m sorry, Gavin. Go back to sleep. Sleep late today,” she advised virtuously; “and I’ll make you a good breakfast when you get up.”
Then Coco got out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans with a denim shirt that were crumpled on the dresser. Troops of self-disgust, fear, and frustration were marching through the lowlands of her spirit. Etchings of Bosch-like images from the past night were on display in her head. The dark sexuality with which she had coexisted on the back porch and the sad scramblings later in her own bed were warring for attention.
“Shit,” Coco said, feeling sick.
She looked in on the children, who were still sleeping, and then ran down the stairs. Suede’s door was firmly shut, and for the first time it occurred to Coco that Sylvia might still be in there, sleeping on the narrow guest bed next to Suede. Coco paused on the landing to consider the contingencies of that possibility, but finding it too much to deal with, she ran quickly down the last flight of stairs. The heat in the rear of the house was a silent, motionless presence that embraced her the moment she entered the kitchen. For a brief second Coco felt anchored in humidity and moored by morning duties. Automatically she moved toward the coffeepot to empty out yesterday’s grounds (for divorce).
And that was when she heard the first hurried sounds from the guest room above the kitchen.
Oh, no, Coco thought weakly. They’re both up there. She could hear them padding around. How awful. How hideous. They were going to hang in all day. They were going to liberate Coco’s house for their own Saturday headquarters. How rude. How wrong of Sylvia to have stayed and of Suede to have let her. Now Coco would spend a hurried, harried, and harassed day trying to look cool while they both spied on her. They would watch Coco cook, clear, care, clean, carry, and cope, so that later on they could inform on her, testify, in front of the world, as to her failures as a woman, a wife, a mother, a hostess, a housekeeper, a cook, a social-activities leader, a chauffeur, a sports-and-nature guide, the weekend cruise director.
Coco made a fresh pot of coffee and then sat down at the table, certain, in her acute state of dissolution, that a mouse or a roach would suddenly dart out from some dark corner to scoot across the linoleum floor.
I’m feeling sort of flimsy this morning, she thought. Things seem sort of temporary. I’m never going to smoke grass again. Ever.
Upstairs she could hear suspicious creaking noises in the guest room. Impulsively Coco stood up, walked to the refrigerator, opened the door, and took stock of her supplies. If she could get the breakfast together before the children came downstairs, she had a chance of stalemating the first half of her Saturday morning. Resolution and weakness were strolling around companionably inside her body. She pulled the breakfast table away from the wall, squeezed in two extra dining-room chairs, and then began scurrying back and forth between the cupboards and the table, setting out her best dishes. Photographs of a Better Homes and Gardens bruncheon danced through her head as she trotted through the first round of chores.
Half an hour later, back upstairs again, she went into action like a speeded-up twenty-millimeter film. She washed, dressed, shushed the children, and brought them down to the kitchen. But she had fed only half of them half of their breakfast when Sylvia appeared in the doorway.
“Good morning,” Sylvia said brightly, like a forty-watt bulb trying to shine. She was wearing what looked like a pair of Suede’s Bermuda shorts, which were several sizes too small for her, and one of his white BVD shirts. Her lower fat wobbled as she came through the doorway, while her upper appendages swung and swayed.
“Oh, hello,” Coco said.
“Who’s dat?” Nicky shouted.
“I’m Sylvia.”
“What are you doing here?” Jessica asked coldly.
Mike just sat stoically, staring at the two huge breasts dangling near the table.
“Can I do anything to help you?” Sylvia asked.
Die, Coco thought. Then she smiled and shook her head.
Sylvia sat down on one of the dining-room chairs, permanently relieved of any further work obligations, and began to watch the four Burman children eat their frosted Pop Tarts with a critical granola gleam in her eye.
“Good morning,” Suede said. He walked into the kitchen wearing his macho like a mantle and a perfect expression of constraint and conspiracy on his face. He sat down at the table next to Sylvia, sent her an Eyes-Only Memo Re: Sex, and finger-combed his thick dark hair in the way that used to knock out coeds at the C. Shoppe in Chicago. “That was some outa-sight grass,” he said, smiling at Coco with careless charm. “How’s chances for some coffee?”
Coco felt an involuntary shiver of approval for Suede—as sex object—shimmy through her body even as her Raised Consciousness voted him the Most Pernicious Pig of All the Male Chauvinists. His early-morning nonchalance clearly confirmed her suspicions that he had finger-fucked both Sylvia and Coco at the same time last night and his audacious camaraderie showed he felt no guilt about it because he recognized no trespass. Suede was still diddling his way through the world’s women, occasionally two at a time, with the same sick compulsion that had driven Coco to alphabetically read her way through the Chicago Public Library, drawer by drawer of the card catalog.
“Sure,” Coco said flatly without moving to serve him, “the coffee’s ready.”
Instantly Sylvia jumped to her feet to fetch the creamer and sugar bowl from the counter, obviously entering into a unilateral competition to serve Suede his breakfast.
When Gavin came downstairs looking disheveled, an hour later, he was struck dumb at the sight of Sylvia and Suede drinking coffee in the kitchen.
“Good morning,” he said after a lengthy awkward pause. “What’s for breakfast?”
Coco stood motionless, leaning against the air-conditioner, so the studio’s still photographer could catch her—hair blowing and shirt flattening against her back—as she reported from on-the-scene back to her team of anchormen: Things aren’t going right; I have no underarm deodorant, vaginal deodorant, foot deodorant—sent to Occupant, free in the mail—Binaca still burning the roof of my mouth, and I can actually smell myself sweating. I really stink. Also, there is a definite taste and smell of decay from my gums. Stim-u-dents do not prevent decay. They only move it around. Weak gums come from bad nerves rather than from not brushing and Dental Floss doesn’t do the trick. Bad body odors come from internal corruption and tension. Then Coco moved off-camera and began frying eggs.
There were several perfectly hideous discussions. One began with Sylvia, speaking as a national official of the women’s liberation movement, summarizing the problems of motherhood. After three long hours of child-care requests—Nicky wanting help to get his sunsuit off so he could go number two, Jessica begging to invite Sarah over, Mike wanting Gavin to walk him to the filling station to fill his bike tires, Joshua needing a clean diaper and an extra bottle—Sylvia looked up from the table where the three adults still sat smoking a
nd skimming through the newspaper and said, “No wonder American women can’t break out of their bag. Four kids can monopolize one adult full time for fifteen years.”
And though Coco agreed—thoroughly, heartily, and bitterly—she could not allow her condition to be diagnosed by a woman who sat perfectly still while Coco met all the juvenile demands, never once offering to help or even clearing away her own breakfast dishes, although it was almost noon and time for lunch.
“Well, it’s always been that way,” Coco said, “and besides, weekends are a little more desperate than weekdays.”
“But it’s time that women see the alternative to nuclear families,” Sylvia insisted.
“Yah. There should be a better way,” Suede agreed sympathetically.
Gavin politically kept quiet while reading the editorial page.
“You know, the average work week for a housewife with kids is between eighty and one hundred hours,” Sylvia continued educationally. “Think of the waste and the duplication—the loss of creative potential—simply because each woman is chained inside her own little house, doing everything alone, while right next door another lady is doing exactly the same things. In an age of mass production, that’s a pretty weird trip. And anyway, the country needs those women to work and build and organize. The female revolution will have to precede any takeover by the workers.”
Coco finished feeding Josh his bottle and then got up to put him in his playpen in the TV room, hoping he’d fall asleep. “So what’s your solution, Sylvia?” she asked when she returned to the kitchen, trying to sound like a neophyte rather than nasty.
“Communes, of course, as an opener.” Sylvia spoke like a recording—not even bothering to inject enthusiasm or emotion. “Or city-block collective day-care centers. If everyone on your street put their children together for the day and another group prepared food for everyone, that would free up seventy-five percent of the women.” Sylvia kept one hand fastened possessively on Suede’s thigh.
Gavin sat a bit apart from the others surreptiously reading the top layer of the newspaper stacked in one corner of the table.
Coco’s anger had opened a three-ring circus of wild feelings in the coliseum of her chest. “And why all of a sudden are women going to start doing things for each other?” she asked. “How come they haven’t gotten together before now?”
“Well, in most primitive societies they do. It’s only capitalism that divides women. Once American women find out that it’s best to organize on a local level, they will.” Sylvia helped herself to another slice of Sara Lee coffeecake and wiped some extra frosting off the side of the container with her finger.
Although Coco’s only satisfaction was watching Sylvia overeat, she still felt uneasy because the Sara Lee was out on the table in its tinfoil box instead of having been transferred to a cake dish. “Well, I don’t think helping people out seems to be a very common human habit.” The moment she said it, Coco thought she had been too obvious. But none of the adults sitting at the table took her criticism personally.
“Of course, I see going far beyond communal child care and community cooking,” Sylvia said. “Eventually people will simply exist in groups, either living or work collectives, and share everything—including each other—with everyone else.”
“Terrific,” Coco mumbled, carrying a stack of egg-smeared dishes to the sink and hoping that one of the many sausages Sylvia had eaten contained a small unnoticed piece of fatal-on-the-spot—according to Mrs. Silverman—pink trichinosis. Sylvia deserved to die. She viewed herself not as Coco’s equal, but as her superior.
“What did you say?” Sylvia asked. There was a silken thread of hostility audible in her voice as she sat in fat overblown certitude, hanging onto Suede’s knee, awaiting the arrival of a social revolution.
“I mean, do you think everyone is going to give up marriage?” Coco asked.
“Oh, yes,” Sylvia said enthusiastically. “Just look at the divorce rate right now. It’s almost eighty percent in some social and economic classes. It’s happening anyway. People just aren’t monogamous,” she laughed seductively.
Coco felt gooseflesh crawl over her body. Then she heard a thin wail from Joshua wanting to get out of the playpen. “Well, how come most people spend their lives looking for the one right person, then?” she asked.
Sylvia stared at Coco.
“It’s other things that cause all the trouble,” Coco concluded obliquely.
“Listen,” Suede interrupted good-naturedly, “the only difference between you two chicks is that Sylvia’s generation thinks men are the problem and Coco’s thought men were the solution.”
Stunned, Coco couldn’t get up to reply. All she could do was hate the smugness and superciliousness of Sylvia Brydan, who certainly was no sister of Coco Burman’s if she couldn’t even help clean up the fucking kitchen.
After another hour of Sylvia’s inanities, Coco wanted to stand up on top of the table and start screaming. She felt an overwhelming urge to deliver an impassioned speech denouncing Gavin as a passive parent as well as an adulterer. She wanted pity and sympathy and drama to blanket her, but she felt deterred by the fear that Gavin might meet her wail of pain with countercharges. A few minutes later Sylvia suggested that she and Suede go out in the patio to play with the children, and then they both sheepishly disappeared through the back door.
Gavin moved in close to Coco’s chair as soon as they were alone. “Listen, this litle visit is fucking up my day. I’d been planning to work all afternoon over at my office. But as long as Sylvia’s here, I think I’m going to pull out the brief I’m writing for their license challenge and do some work on it with her. I was going to hold it off for a week or so, but I might as well kill two birds …”
Coco shrugged, feeling instantly exiled by Gavin’s sudden, energetic determination to work. His bright commitment reinfected her with a need to return to her novel. Even her own disorganized negative side effects of working on a book-without-a-theme seemed better than a long lethargic day in the kitchen waiting to make the next meal, waiting to unbutton the next pair of pants, waiting to untie, unknot, or undo another child.
Feeling abandoned, Coco unconsciously moved toward the cookie jar and transferred an Oreo cookie into her mouth.
Eat … eat, she thought. Stuff it in … fill up your little vacuum.
“And what do you think I’m supposed to do?” she asked Gavin as the white inner frosting began to dissolve in her mouth softening the chocolate crumbs.
Gavin examined her face, decided that she had only issued the challenge automatically, without any battle plan, and retreated back into his own invisible docket of legal cases. “Listen, later on I’ll take the kids out for a while. I have to pick up some papers at my office, so I’ll take them over there, and you can have a rest.” Then, remembering some affection for her, he moved toward the sink, where she was standing, looped his arm around her shoulders in a rush of apology, and pulled her against him.
And though Coco desperately wanted his nearness and attention, wanted to rebalance the emotional scale by which they weighted their marriage, she pulled back, dissatisfied with the quality of his attention and determined to disdain anything short of total engagement.
So Gavin turned toward the back door and walked outside to summon Sylvia. Within a few minutes he led her silently back through the kitchen and disappeared. Seconds later, forsaking the baseball game he had been playing with Mike, Suede returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table to watch Coco wash the dishes.
“You know, if McGovern wins the nomination, I’m going to work on his campaign,” Coco said. “I bet if I really worked my ass off and he won, I could get a job in the government. Actually, maybe I could be undersecretary of transportation in charge of elementary-school car pools.” Coco continued, pushing a sponge in and out of the water, clenching it dry with an angry fist and then benevolently letting it fill again.
“What’s wrong with you, Coco?” Suede asked. “If you�
��re upset because Gavin’s got a girlfriend, why don’t you just split? Get out. You can make it on your own.”
Coco looked out the window above the sink and slowly strangled her sponge with murderous fingers. “I’m too hung up,” Coco said vaguely. “I’m a statusquo head.”
“But …” Suede paused suggestively, silently referring to their own past relations to reestablish Gavin’s sexual insufficiency. Suede was devoted to spontaneous sexual-superiority ratings—which were his substitutes for a wife and family—and contact with Gavin always produced sexual performance rankings.
But Coco did not want to play. “Listen, I’m going to go to the grocery store,” she said suddenly.
Suede looked surprised that she would voluntarily sacrifice an opportunity for a soul talk with him, but he played it cool, for he knew his customer. “Say. I meant to tell you. I bumped into Ann last week in East Hampton.”
Coco froze into a Masters and Johnson preorgasmic stage which could dissolve into despair or crescendo into ecstasy depending upon the next moment’s move. “Oh?” she said.
“Yah. She was out there staying at some arty-farty commune. But she looked great.”
Coco lifted the aluminum strainer out of the sink and thumped its debris into the garbage can. Suede had always liked putting Coco on by mentioning her predecessor and then watching the reaction. But over the years Coco had finally devised a who?-oh-yes-how-is-she? tone of voice with which to respond while she steeled herself for the news.
“She said she’s coming down to Washington for that women’s march on July Fourth. She’s covering it for The New York Times Magazine.”
“Oh,” Coco said, feeling her female orgasms shrivel. Painfully she could remember night-long conversations with Suede in the Billings Hospital Cafeteria on the University of Chicago campus discussing Ann, Ann and Gavin, Gavin and Coco, Coco and Suede, or Suede and Gavin endlessly, in delicious detail, unraveling and retangling the incestuous knots while they smoked and drank coffee and Coco got high on nicotine, caffein, and the sweet-sour taste of Ann’s name on her lips.
Loose Ends Page 13
