“Oh, ish,” Jessica groaned.
“But it could be fun. Just you and me.”
“You mean we wouldn’t have to go to the zoo?”
“No. We’ll have a treasure hunt instead.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, it’s like that time I put a bounty of yellow pencils that had points, erasers and didn’t give slivers. If you can find your pink barrettes in that terrible drawer in the den or the key to the basement or the magnet that goes to the can opener then you’ll get a prize. Each time I’ll tell you what to hunt for—what the treasure is—and then, after you clean the drawer and find it, you get a prize.”
“Does Nicky get to play too?”
“Well, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll give him a different drawer to do it in.”
A short silence.
“Mama, are you afraid to sleep in the house when Daddy isn’t home?”
Coco’s tears were mobilizing swiftly now, ready to overrun the lowlands of her soul. The nearness and niceness of her little daughter seemed to test all her controls. “No, not at all,” she lied.
“All right, Mama, I’ll play that silly hunting game. Let’s go down and start.”
“Right now? Right this minute?” Coco squeaked, still limp from sleep and emotion.
“You said so, Mother. You’re the one who wanted to play.”
And the hard demanding look began to tighten Jessica’s face, so that in self-defense Coco collected her strength and began moving desperate to avoid a confrontation that would sabotage the day.
“Have you had your BM, Jessica?” Coco asked, standing up and feeling the weight of her own enormous load shift within her distended stomach.
“Yes. But I told you not to ask me. I’m going to wear my blue suit,” Jessica said, sprinting toward her door.
“I wish somebody would ask me,” Coco said reflectively, and then began to dress.
For some reason that Sunday was better than the previous ones in June. With Gavin and Mike away and the phone still ominously silent, Coco’s impatience and anger shriveled up. Although Joshua knocked over an empty coffee can filled with Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, and Lego bricks that rolled away into lethal hiding places, Coco’s nerves were steady and her breathing regular. Cleaning made the time seem fluid so that the day didn’t become combative. Nicky even agreed to be the mailman, which consisted of carrying trash into the kitchen garbage can, so Jessia copped the lead role of treasure hunter.
Late in the afternoon Coco put the children in the car, picked up Mike in Chevy Chase, and stopped for dinner at a taco restaurant which accepted Central Charge cards. Later that night, when the children were sleeping, Coco sat in the living room on the long blue couch, where she had lain with Suede two nights before and reread her entire manuscript. Occasionally she felt moved by a particular passage, but when she had finished reading, she buried her manuscript—with no intention of ever unearthing it—beneath the whiskey bottles in the lowest cabinet of the bar. Then she went downstairs to the kitchen, opened the huge sketchbook to a clean page, and began to write a review of her novel for the Washington Post—her own unsolicited literary obituary.
TAKE HEAVEN BY STORM BY CHARLOTTE BURMAN. PUBL. BY RANDOM HOUSE. $6.95. pp. 300. Reviewed by Karl Stankiewicz, Professor of American Literature at George Washington University.
And what have we got today? Well, it’s another novel in the ever-growing list of female complaints by self-centered, egocentric, whining American women who clearly have nothing to feel badly about except their own egocentricity and narcissism. While the war in Vietnam continues to rage, while poverty, unemployment, crime, inadequate housing, and ecological disasters plague our nation, a group of well-adjusted but giddy middle-aged women sit around writing bad novels in which they rail against easily identifiable men for various psychological and genital shortcomings. How boring … how obvious … how poorly done. Although the heroines of these clit-lit books are totally crippled by their own bitchery, they totally eclipse any of the other characters—especially their pale Jewish mates. These books are spun out of authorial hysteria and attain overwhelming neurotic proportions rather than any fictive status.
The latest contender for the Ms. American Bitch crown is Gwensandra Rappaport. Sandy, as she is called in bed, was ill-conceived by a local lady—Mrs. Charlotte Burman—whose only show of subtlety was casting her book in the third-person singular, thereby ineffectively veiling her roman à clef. For Ms. Burman’s first novel, Take Heaven by Storm, is a poorly disguised autobiography of a JAP (Jewish American Princess), from a small principality on the near North Side of Lake Michigan, who takes off on a Hunt for the Wholly Male with such an overdeveloped sense of expectation that her relentless and tireless chase is inevitably doomed to failure. Since she attributes her monomaniacal husband-hunting to the brainwashing of her Jewish parents (are there any other kinds these days?), she holds them totally responsible for all her Ms. Conceptions, Ms. Takes and Ms. Adventures.
Gwensandra Rappaport has deluded herself into thinking that if she tries out enough men, like dresses on a rack, she will find one that fits and thus attain eternal happiness. Her constant discovery that no man is quite right—that each needs some alteration—is viewed as either bum luck or sexual deficiences peculiar to the Male Sex. What the author—who tries very hard to be witty, clever, and caustic—never seems to understand (any more than her silly, superficial heroine) is that Gwensandra’s tragedy is caused by a comic flaw in her character (if she has one). By sleeping her way through a cross-section of the male population (none of whom can rise up to the height of her expectations), she overlooks the fact that there is no man who can make her happy, because happiness is a self-created condition. Responsibility for oneself is a whole new ball game, and it’s tough teaching an old dog new tricks.
While the catalog discontents of our heroine’s holds our attention as much as any well-organized laundry list, the reader does get some insight into Ms. Burman and a lot of her sullen sulky sisters around the country. What exactly do these totally undisciplined women—who apparently have full-time domestic help to care for anywhere from one to ten kids while they write—really want? A good job? A better screw? A contraceptive pill for men? Divorce insurance? House and field slaves? The presidency? What? It is quite clear that America’s women do not know what they want—so neither they, nor their men, can possibly provide it.
Why don’t these bright, energetic ladies address themselves to the problems of their sisters—around the world—who are still living in starvation, disease, oppression, indeed, purdah—and stop writing novels they don’t even bother to polish anymore than their silvers? But if their itch to bitch is overwhelming, how about looking at some other ethnic groups for a change? (A Martian would think 97 percent of Americans are Jewish women.) Where are the novels about the chicano women of Texas, the black women in Harlem, the Polish women of Pennsylvania who wait after mine explosions for their men’s bodies to be brought up?
Ladies! Ladies! Open your false-lashed eyes and look around you! Jewish princesses are not the largest or most oppressed ethnic constituency in America, and we are getting tired of hearing you kvetch. Down with counterrevolutionary princesses! Up Real women!
Coco locked the back door and walked through the first floor turning off lights. On the second floor she opened the guest-room door, glanced toward the unmade bed full of tangled linens that Suede had left behind like a sick joke, and then walked outside onto her porch. She stood motionless in the darkness remembering the bright eagerness of June—with all its prerogatives, privileges, and promises. The moon was shining behind the decaying apartment building across the alley, and on the skyline she could see the illuminated dome of the U.S. Capitol. An enormous weariness began to wrap itself around Coco’s body, pressing on her cheeks and eyes. She turned about and gently transported her tired body up to her bedroom.
twenty-four
Gavin did not call on Monday.
Around noon Coc
o decided to risk tying up her line for a short while and began telephoning baby-sitters so she could go to the demonstration on Tuesday. She made eight phone calls, but all of her prospects were either out of town, planning picnics or working holiday shifts at Georgetown Hospital the next day. Feeling like a hopeless, helpless shut-in, Coco sat at the kitchen table verging on tears and despising Gavin for splitting before his July Fourth baby-sitting assignment.
“What’s the matter with you, Mom?” Mike asked, passing through on his way to the backyard.
“Nothing, darling.” Coco made her lips stretch sideways into the approximation of a smile. “But we’re out of milk. I thought we could all take a walk up to the store.”
“Okay,” he agreed.
So he helped Coco drag a limited amount of equipment down the front stairs. But as they started up the block, Coco saw several girls sitting on the front stairs of the Women’s Commune call out to Nicky, who was peddling at the front of their parade. Innocently he slowed down, and then, with his head shyly lowered, parked his trike to hear what they were saying. Coco, who was helping Jessica push the stroller, felt herself cringe, but she kept up her pace and her spirits until she reached the commune.
“Hi,” one of the girls said. She was wearing a man’s shirt with the sleeves cut off unevenly above her bony elbows.
“Hi,” Coco answered, and then unexpectedly, self-defensively, she launched a first strike. “Listen, is there any chance that anyone in your commune might be able to baby-sit for me tomorrow during the day?” The words tasted sour on her tongue. Why was she destined to see every woman under twenty as a potential baby-sitter rather than an equal? “I was planning to march in the Women’s Independence Day demonstration to the Capitol,” she explained carefully, as an act of redemption.
“I doubt it,” the other girl said. She was thin and had pale blond Hair and a tired, sad-looking face. Still, she was pushing Nicky’s trike back and forth with her bare foot in a friendly effort to entertain him while she spoke to Coco. “Most of us are going to the march too.”
Coco felt a flush of embarrassment leap into her cheeks at her insensitivity. Of course they would all be going. Of course, that was their thing—a women’s march; they too were a part of it all and probably for them it was more real than for Coco, less political and more authentic.
“I thought you probably would be,” Coco said apologetically, rocking the stroller back and forth as Joshua began cranking up to cry.
“But why don’t you come inside for a minute,” the first girl said. “Sheila’s home, and I don’t think she’s going to the march.”
“All right.” Coco pressed her arms close to her body so that the sweat rolling down her arms wouldn’t drop to the pavement like a drop of pee. Her stomach was beginning to ache again, and it felt painfully hard when she tested it with her elbow. Jessica was studying the two young women solemnly and even Mike had come close enough to hear what was happening.
Coco kicked down the foot brake on the stroller—once again envisioning Joshua crumpled and broken under the wheels of a Railway Express van on Connecticut Avenue—and she started up the stairs so she wouldn’t appear anxious or over-protective.
“I want to come in too,” Jessica said.
“Me, too,” Nicky squealed, jumping to the sidewalk.
And then, of course, Nicky’s trike, unleashed at the top of the incline, started to roll downhill.
“Oh,” Coco screamed, even though the trike was riderless.
“I got it,” Mike said, grabbing the handlebars.
“Honey, please hold onto Josh’s stroller,” Coco begged nervously. “I’m afraid it might roll away too.”
“I’ll hold the stroller,” the blond girl said. Her voice was a soft whisper, sad as her face, and her lips barely moved as she spoke.
“Thank you,” Coco said politely. What am I doing? she thought. I don’t dare take Josh out of there now, because I’m too fucking other-directed but I am leaving my baby in the hands of a spaced-out, dope-smoking, acid-dropping, communally balling, part-time lesbian, Woodstock-Weatherwoman who probably has venereal-disease germs on her fingers. But she followed the first girl up the stairs, holding Nicky and Jessica by the hand, and as she turned (under the pretense of stopping the screen door from slamming), expecting to see Josh hurtling down the hill, she saw that the blond girl had lifted him out of the stroller and was holding him in her arms while she talked to Mike.
How nice, Coco thought, filled with a swelling rush of gratitude because a stranger had understood her concern and was trying to be helpful. Locked up in her own neuroses, Coco had forgotten that the world still had people in it who weren’t either men or husband-snatchers and that there were still women out there who would instinctively lift a whimpering baby out of a stroller and say hi to a three-year-old boy driving past on a trike.
The front room of the commune was dark because the American flags were drawn, or lowered, half-mast, there were no women’s-liberation spies crouched behind the Stars and Stripes. Instead there were three young women sitting around on sagging furniture reading newspapers, drinking coffee, and looking more dormitoryish than depraved.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know your name,” the girl beside Coco reminded her.
“Oh, I’m Coco Burman. I live right up the block.”
“Yes I know. We see you go past all the time.”
Aha.
“I’m Judy. Sheila,” she called out, “this is Coco Burman and she’s looking for a baby-sitter for tomorrow so she can go to the march.”
One of the girls got up off the couch. She was the prettiest one so far and seemed to have more vitality than the others.
“Hi. I’m Sheila Parker,” she said, and then she also bent over and introduced herself to Jessica and Nicky. “I should give you one of our Children’s Commune handouts. We’re organizing an all-day camp-school or day-care thing for the kids around here. But, anyway”—she paused thoughtfully—“I could baby-sit for you tomorrow. Since everyone will be gone, you could bring them over here.”
Oh, oh.
“Well, I think it’s probably best at my house,” Coco said, feeling ninety-five years and two-hundred pounds old. “So the baby can sleep in his own crib.” There it was, right out front, right at the start, the damning, damaging difference between Coco and them. Joshua Burman could fall asleep only at home in his own little crib, with his worn-away satin-edged blanket, his pacifier, his bothers, and his night light.
“That’s okay. I’ll come over there. What’s your address?”
“2594.”
“Swell. I could use the bread, and I think your kids look great to talk to. What time?”
“About ten-thirty if that’s okay.”
“Sure.”
“Wow,” Coco said, so sincerely touched that she wanted to talk to the natives in their own language. And then—suddenly she felt as if she were beginning to melt, as if her inner organs were getting soft and mushy. Gratitude—because the young women all seemed very sympathetic and had actually spoken directly to the children, looking right into their faces, treating them as little people—made Coco feel weak. After so many nights and days of frightening solo flights, all at once Coco wanted to sit down cross-legged on the floor, take off her shoes and her makeup and her eyelashes and her bra, and tell them that her husband had left, that her chauvinist-pig boyfriends had split, that her only girlfriend was off on a junket, and that her shrink was on vacation, and that she was all alone and couldn’t quite get it together. But instead, she began to move toward the door, shyly motioning Nicky and Jessica to follow. Outside she hurried down the stairs to retrieve Joshua, hoping he hadn’t made his doodoo while the girl was holding him, waved vaguely back toward the commune, and started off again to the store.
twenty-five
Coco was awakened the next morning at seven when she heard Joshua screaming from his crib and Jessica yelling from her bedroom.
“Okay,” Coco called. “Here I com
e.” She bounded out of bed and ran down the hallway into the boys’ room. She was instantly enveloped by a foul odor as she lifted Joshua out of his crib.
“Phewey, he sthinkths,” Nicky said from the top bunk. “And he woked me up.”
“God, Ma, change him,” Mike chimed in with a disgruntled voice.
“Well, that’s what I’m doing,” Coco said. Her stomach churned as she replaced Josh in the crib and unpinned the diaper filled with loose, messy stool.
“Mama,” Jessica called.
“Jessica, will-you-please-wait-a-minute.”
“When’s Daddy coming home?” Mike asked with a slight burr of suspicion in his voice. He was lying face down on his bunk.
“I don’t know,” Coco said, gagging around the two plastic Donald Duck diaper pinheads clenched between her teeth. Her stomach, cramping from constipation, moved in a queasy motion as she wiped up her son’s diarrhea. Maybe I need an enema, she thought grimly. Maybe my enemies have driven me to enemas. She went into the bathroom, wet some toilet paper, returned to wipe off Joshua’s buttocks, and then ran back to kneel on her knees before the toilet bowl to rinse the diaper. Slowly the water in the bowl turned brown, leaving dark water marks on both of Coco’s arms when she finally stood up to deposit the stained diaper in the hamper.
When do I get to take a shit? she asked the post-lib poster girl, in the medicine-chest mirror as she scrubbed her hands and arms. The poster girl smiled encouragingly.
Coco went back to her own bedroom, opened the closet, and began looking through her clothes. “I don’t have a thing to wear,” she said spitefully, to mock Dr. Finkelstein’s penis-envy theory. The day would be too hot for slacks, and her mini-dresses looked too short and frivolous. Finally Coco put on an African print shift, a modest amount of makeup, and brown leather sandals.
Loose Ends Page 29
