Loose Ends

by Raskin, Barbara;

  “Listen. This is too much,” Coco said with an unmistakable accent of hysteria. “I can’t manage all these shitty bikes. We’re going home. You can just sit and watch television all day if you have to drag every goddamn toy you own to the goddamn park for a stinking hour.”

  “Aww, Ma. Cool it,” Mike groaned with disgust. “I’ll take them all across. You just grab Nicky.”

  Oh, no, Coco thought wildly. Oh, no. I’m not going to become dependent on Mike now. I’m not going to get into that. He shouldn’t even be here, she thought, feeling more frantic. Why wasn’t he out in some green field playing softball or swimming in an Olympic-sized pool. Why wasn’t he having a normal boyhood instead of letting his middle-aged, middle-class, middle-American Jewish mother make him into an unpaid substitute baby-sitter, a poor exploited—obviously destined to become flagrantly homosexual now that there was no father figure around the house—eldest son. What was Coco if not an ugly aggressive Mrs. Portnoy thwarting her son’s sexual, social, and athletic development? Oh, Coco should change her name to Ms. Portnoy or Ms. Take or Ms. Stress or ever better, Ms. Calculation or Ms. Begotten.

  “Mikey,” Coco moved forward to put her hand on his shoulder. “Why don’t you call up Skip later on? Maybe you can go over to his house and play some ball.”

  “Sure. Okay,” he shrugged, “if you don’t need me this afternoon. But I thought Mrs. Marshall couldn’t come this week.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Coco said penitently. “I’m going to find someone else to help out later today.”

  Shut up, she said to the newly established Department of Economics in her brain. Forget the money. If worse came to worst, she could always turn a couple of tricks at the Arlington Marriott Motel to pay for a baby-sitter instead of turning Mike into a homosexual nursemaid.

  “As a matter of fact, I’ll even drive you over to Skip’s if his mother says it’s okay.”

  Horrors were mounting upon horrors. There she was stranded on the curbstone of Macomb Street—not wanting to cross, not wanting to march in defeat past the hidden but judgmental eyes of the Women’s Commune—suddenly promising to spend hours on the telephone hunting for a baby-sitter to be paid out of some nonexistent emergency funds on the first day of her life when she had no income or source of support and not one cent more than the seven dollars and some odd cents in her wallet, promising to drive through the entire city of Washington (a gouache of heat and traffic) to deliver Mike out to the suburbs for a few hours of outdoor life before returning to pick him up.

  But then, God, looking a little like Dr. Finkelstein up in the sky on his golden throne, gave Coco a moment of grace. For without any effort she suddenly swallowed a huge gulp of rich-bodied air that went directly into the dried-out bags of her lungs so that she could draw a full breath. In and out. In and out. Her lungs had begun working normally, independently. Thank you, Coco said and then, temporarily high on oxygen, she marshaled the children across the street to the park. Mike instantly found his way into a baseball game with some older (not younger) boys. The girls played hop-scotch, Nicky drove around the water fountain in furiously happy circles, and Josh crawled ecstatically into the sandbox.

  So Coco sat down on a bench, still breathing nicely, and began to watch a long-haired young mother, photogenically braless and slim in a faded cotton dress, push her fair-haired child high on a swing. Why am I so different from her, Coco wondered, painfully enamored of the girl’s natural glamour. There was no way in the world Suede would have cut out on that chick if her old man split. Suede would have hung in with her forever. Mesmerized, Coco watched the young woman move like a ballerina, dancing with the swing. And slowly it occurred to her that the difference between them wasn’t one of age—it wasn’t that Coco was old and the girl was young—but that Coco was old and the girl was new.

  Coco was definitely a fifties person, not even in the same ballpark as the truly liberated young girls who let their children run barefoot and bareass through the park with their little pink rinky-dinks bobbing up and down. No, Coco was from a different generation, a different world. The little kid on the swing had been acculturated so long he probably wouldn’t even answer if someone asked whether he was a boy or a girl. He could probably fall asleep anywhere—on the floor, in a commune, on the back seat of a renovated hearse, on a grassy hill covered with a cloud of grass smoke, and he probably didn’t give a damn if his mommy took a nap with some guy who had a long pony tail and wore a necklace.

  But Coco’s kids were different. They thought men who wore love beads were queer, and they couldn’t fall asleep anyplace in the world except in their own beds or on airplanes immediately after vomiting. Each one needed his own crib, blanket, address, pillow, drawer, corner, and telephone number. Each one liked his own TV programs, window in the car, chair at the table, Kool-Aid flavors, his own bench in the park, his own hiding places, shelves, closets, combs, friends, toilet, cereal, and individual stall for his toothbrushes. Coco couldn’t wander from hippie pad to Vermont commune. Her kids wouldn’t eat vegetables—fresh, cooked, canned, frozen, or organic. They wouldn’t eat Cream of Wheat—let alone crunchy granola—and they wouldn’t touch peanut butter unless it was Skippy’s plain, not crunchy. They didn’t like homemade bread because it wouldn’t slice straight. They thought health foods were for sick people, and they would never miss The Dating Game or What’s My Line? to weed a field of corn with members of some extended family. They never went to the toilet without shutting the door and they wouldn’t take off their shoes at the park because they were afraid of stepping on broken glass and having to go to a crowded emergency room for stitches. They definitely were not swingers like the little kid swinging through the air. They were obviously prerevolutionary, middle-class, middle-American, middle-of-the-road Dr. Spock-type kids.

  So what’s wrong with that?—a public defender for pre-lib ladies suddenly appeared on the scene. They’re nice kids and they like people. They’re smart and sensitive and decent.

  Yah? Then why so uptight?—a post-lib prosecutor countered.

  I don’t care if they are square, Coco said defensively to a rather long-haired jury. I never wanted them to be any different. I never carried any of my babies on my back in an orange papoose when I marched on the White House. I always hired a sitter.

  Then you shouldn’t have broken up your family. (Was that Mrs. Silverman hiding behind the pre-lib legal counsel’s table?)

  But suddenly a shriek filled the air around Coco’s head and she was on her feet and running before she saw it was Nicky who had fallen off his trike. He was lying in a puddle of water that had sloshed out of the fountain, and his left ear was bleeding. Gobs of blood hit the pavement, splattering like red ink. Nicky began to scream louder as kids flocked crazily around him. And then the pretty young hippie mother came over, wet a wad of Kleenex she took from her pocket, and neatly held the compress against the raw flesh of Nicky’s earlobe, while Coco fought to keep down her chocolate doughnut. Ten minutes later Nicky was happily driving his trike around the fountain again, with the little hippie boy riding on the back, avoiding puddles with exaggerated full-wheel turns. At two o’clock the children and several new friends shared their picnic lunch. Coco was feeling semi-successful when a fight broke out between Jessica and Nicky about who should carry the garbage to the trashcan, and then, humiliated, Coco gathered up the equipment and took everyone back home again.

  It was ten to three on the kitchen clock. And it was still Saturday.

  During the next hour Coco bathed Nicky and Josh, put Josh down for his nap, called Georgetown Hospital and found a nursing student who would baby-sit, talked with Skip’s mother, who invited Mike to sleep over, settled the girls down to paint with a box of water colors she kept hidden on top of the Frigidaire for emergency distractions, and then went upstairs to her own bedroom, flooded with despair and panic.

  I must learn to love peace and privacy, Coco thought, shutting the door and trying to remember advice Dr. Finkels
tein had given her during her false emergency of June. I must cherish my own quiet times, protect my solitude, pursue my own interests.

  But what interests did she have? Coco plunged face-downward on the bed. What in the name of God was she interested in? Why did Dr. Finkelstein always lobby for a hobby? What was there to be interested in? Horticulture? Foreign coins? The Divine Light Mission? Political posters? Needlepoint? Ceramic potting?

  Coco turned her head on the pillow and looked around the confusion of her bedroom. Perhaps it would be therapeutic to redecorate her house. Perhaps she could convert her bedroom into a combination sleeping, sitting-room and study. Maybe she should go out and buy several ugly round tables at the Salvation Army so she could disguise them beneath gay felt cloths. Then she could grow paper daisies in ceramic bowls surrounded by hot-pink-and-orange cardboard boxes full of non-functional drawers and lots of small silver-framed photographs of the children. When summer was over the room would become her study. Then she could have fuchsia wicker baskets full of personal mail and bigger avocado-colored wicker baskets full of Vogues and Harper’s Bazaars, and pussy willows and Mexican paper flowers. Then she could bring friends upstairs, and it would be a sitting room. She could even have a party there—a goddamn gang-bang on her king-size bed.

  “It won’t work,” Coco said to the ceiling. The Burman house was an insoluble decorating problem because it had more than enough closet and storage space. It didn’t pose the small-apartment puzzles solved every Sunday in The New York Times Magazine. Coco didn’t need any sleeping lofts built halfway up in the air or form fitted storage drawers, shelves and filing cabinets hidden under radiators and staircases or above windows in the kitchen to be painted in marvelously coordinated tenant-inventive-decorator colors. Coco simply didn’t have any nice hard space problems to work out.

  She got up, took off her clothes, aimed the air-conditioner vents toward the bed, and lay down again. What she had to do now was figure out what she should do. But even before that, she had to try to understand what had happened. All day long Coco had subliminally been trying to remember the cause of her complaint against Gavin. Her quarrel with him had lasted twelve years, but now in her confusion she couldn’t recall the subject of their decade-long discussion. Although Gavin had always been the primary irritant in her life, now that he was gone he had vindictively removed both the source and object of her rage so that now Coco couldn’t even remember what she had been angry about.

  Don’t panic, she cautioned herself. Think positively. Even if hysteria kept welling up every few minutes, it could still be channeled into creative writing. Panic itself could produce a brilliant panoramic epic of the sixties, and instead of eating compulsively or calling up friends or looking for lovers, Coco could now choose a new theme for her book and outline all of the chapters on a long yellow legal pad. Then she would not scream at her children. Then she would not be too tired to melt cheese with bacon crumbs on top of their hamburgers for dinner. Then she would really want to take Joshua with her every time she went to the supermarket so he could ride in the jump seat of the shopping cart.

  Tears came to Coco’s eyes. Maybe if she spent more time with Josh he would learn to say bye-bye. He was almost thirteen months old, and he still didn’t know a single word. The hot, stinging tears rolled down her face. Her baby. Her last baby. Joshua. She had neglected him. No wonder he was speechless.

  And what about Jessica? What could Coco possibly do about Jessica? Was it really nuclear family life that had made Jessica so difficult—both wild and withdrawn? Or had Coco also failed her only daughter? Perhaps if they went to the park alone and lay in the grass feeding pigeons like those old ladies from the schizophrenic halfway house on Ordway, Coco could soothe Jessica. But only Mike understood Jessica’s moods and knew how to quiet her tantrums. Mike. Mikey. He knew how to comfort and love the babies better than Coco did and he always ran outside to help Coco carry in groceries. So what was so great about that? Did she want him to be a homosexual permanent mother’s helper?

  Coco cried steadily. Why didn’t Gavin call? Where was he? She thought about phoning Suede in New York to say that Gavin had found out about their affair and was starting instant divorce proceedings, that he had left her alone in the world in a house with broken locks, four children, mice in the kitchen, and a lousy doorknob that could turn the toilet into a living tomb. Coco would sound so seductive over the telephone that Suede would catch the next shuttle back to Washington and the children wouldn’t even be suspicious when he moved back into the house.

  He’ll never come back, a post-lib choral group began to sing. He’ll never come back. He’ll never come back. He’ll never invite you to New York. He’s afraid of you … afraid … afraid …

  Coco reached for the telephone, direct-dialed New York, and hung up after fourteen rings.

  Oh, yes, it was true. Coco was alone, all alone, just her and her children and her needs, most of which remained mysteriously unspecified. But it was becoming patently clear that she would never be passionately loved by many great men, that for her there would be no illicit liaisons or promiscuous passions. Her future was a vast wasteland. She thought about Take Heaven by Storm and decided that it was no longer relevant to her life—no longer a subject she could deal with. Last month Dr. Finkelstein had suggested she write a book called Vengeance Is Mine Saith the Lord. Then he wasted a good half-hour telling her a long tedious tale about the Jews who remained behind in Egypt to avenge the Pharaoh and thus were destroyed along with the Egyptians. Coco, in all-fairness, had to concede that it sounded like a major theme, certainly heavy enough to warrant explication in a graduate English seminar, but it wasn’t exactly what Coco felt like writing. She wanted something that sounded heavy but was easy to handle.

  “Hurry, Ma,” Mike yelled.

  Coco jumped up. Instead of taking a shower, she sprayed her body with lemon scent and then slipped on a sheer low-cut sundress. She put on makeup, brushed her hair, and decided that she looked quite young and rather beautiful framed in her own familiar mirror.

  After the babysitter arrived Coco drove Mike out to Chevy Chase, Maryland. The car was stuffy and smelled slightly of mildew—an odor which had permeated the upholstery since she left the windows open during Hurricane Agnes. Out of the corner of her eye, Coco noticed that the car floor was even dirtier than the kitchen linoleum and she wondered if the Sanitation Department could ticket moving vehicles. Wrapper peelings, sandwich crusts, toys, sweaters, a broken car seat, several old brown bag lunches, highway BINGO cards, match books, crushed Kleenex boxes, library books, spilled Crackerjacks, empty soda pop bottle and mixed up, criss-crossed seat belts surrounded her.

  But despite the smell and the confusion, she tried very hard to pay attention to Mike during the ride and engaged in an animated discussion about Washington losing the Senators. When she screwed-up by mentioning the N.F.L.—indeed miscalling it the N.L.F.—she pretended she was just teasing him. When they reached Skip’s house, she kissed Mike good-bye and drove away quickly so that none of his suburban friends would discover he had a mother.

  twenty-one

  Coco drove slowly back down Connecticut Avenue, disturbed by the fact that she had a baby-sitter at home, four free hours with nothing to do and no place to go.

  Why don’t you stop and have a drink over at the Shoreham? a Chicago pre-libby orientation guide suggested hospitably. You can always get your shit together when you’re sitting in a bar.

  So Coco stepped on the accelerator, leaned toward the window to give her hair a wind-blow, and adopted a look of pure desperation.

  At the hotel she treated herself to a stall in the underground parking garage and then floated skyward in an elevator, her heart racing against the floor numbers flashing on the control panel.

  But Coco, clearly, no longer felt like a swinger readying to raid a bar. Now she was something else.… Now she was a desperate ring-less counterrevolutionary unwed mother in a miniskirt short enough to reveal an overgro
wn pubic hair and a French bra that worked valiantly to collect enough tired tits to create some cleavage.

  “But I’m still going to make it,” Coco promised the sisterhood. She stepped off the elevator into the thickly carpeted lobby, smiling and swishing the fringes of her false eyelashes. Invariably, over the years, each time Coco had reactivated the hunt for her P.L. and/or an alternative lifestyle (which simply meant daring to walk through the doorway of a dizzingly fearsome bar) her identity was critically endangered. On each occassion when the compulsion to find romance overwhelmed her normal timidities, she risked psychological annihilation at the hands of some bar fly who didn’t realize that she was a J.A.P. in disguise. And since illicit pursuits demanded a false identity, each adventure imperiled her anyway-shaky self-image. So on a day like this one, impersonating someone else was semi-suicidal.

  So Coco walked quickly toward the cocktail lounge while her heart muscles squeezed out twinges of terror that moved like cramps through her soul. She tried “holding her breath Lamaze-style, but the tail end of each panicky feeling made her cringe, and she could no more ignore her fear than she could overlook labor contractions. Her marriage had fallen apart and she was hurting.

  But when she reached the cocktail lounge, social and cinematic standards claimed her attention because there were so many things that needed doing. First off, she had to transmit a classically traditional air of desperation, because she could not bear, even for a moment, to appear common or ordinary to the live audience already seated in the darkened theater. Her entrance had to convince everyone that her unescorted arrival was warranted by some mysterious but terrible dramatic event.

  An amazingly long-legged hostess who looked glamorous, intelligent, and ten years Coco’s junior accosted her in the dark cavernous doorway of the cocktail lounge.