17. Uncollected, untitled, and unpublished short poem by Marilyn Hacker.
18. Hacker, “Senora P.,” in Separations, p. 16.
20. In a poem written in 1985, Marilyn looked back on some of this time:
… Moondark to dawn, loud streets were not-quite-scary
footnotes in a nocturnal dictionary
of argot softer on my ears than known
four-walled cadenzas …
From Avenue C west to Sixth Avenue
and Eighth Street, I’d aim for the all-night Whelan’s,
eat solo ham and eggs. The night sky paled, sands
into the river’s timer. One more day:
jeans switched for dark dress, tight shoes; the subway
to work at Altman’s. Five months short of twenty,
I knocked back whatever the river sent. He
was gone two days: might bring back, on the third
some kind of night music I’d never heard:
Sonny the burglar, paunched with breakfast beers;
olive-skinned Simon, who made fake Vermeers;
the card-sharp who worked clubcars down the coast …19
The argot of the times? We “knocked back drinks” at Dirty Dick’s—i.e., drank them. But a literal reading retains the suggestion of rejection. Does it matter that it was Shirley who made the “Vermeers,” not Simon? Or that it was Bigelow’s half a block north, with its all-night breakfast counter—not Whelan’s (which served no food)? Or that I have no memory at all of the card-sharp I might have brought home? Are these matters of meter or memory—and what is their intricate connection?
Such points do not matter for the poem. I have no problem recognizing it.
19. Hacker, “Nights of 1962,” Grand Street 6, no. 1 (1986).
21. Some new friends we made that August included a couple who lived down on Fourth Street, Baird and Margie. Baird worked at the post office; Margie was a keypunch operator. Both were artists, though Margie, a comfortable blond from Mt. Eyrie, West Virginia, had the greater talent and the greater energy. Somehow we all managed to end up taking life drawing classes together in the basement of the Art Students League up on Fifty-seventh Street. And Marilyn now had a scholarship to one of the League’s painting courses, with Edwin Dickenson. Somehow we all spent a lot of time singing together, despite the fact that Marilyn couldn’t carry a tune. I started taking my guitar over to sing in the Village coffee shops during the evenings; another friend was a young dyke named Carol, who formerly managed a long, narrow coffee shop on Third Street, just west of MacDougal, the Cafe Elysée, where from time to time I’d go to sing and pass the basket among the tourists in the evening, sandwiched in between some of the singers I mentioned earlier. (Eventually Carol would write the lesbian column in The Matachine Newsletter, “Move Over, Boys.”)
22.1. My mother had a small summer house in the Beacon-Poughkeepsie area, just beyond a railroad crossing called Hopewell Junction. My father had designed the place—stolid, foursquare, compact—and supervised its construction before I was born. For years, throughout my childhood, we’d given an annual Labor Day party there, where a whole pig was split open and barbecued throughout the night, under the orange canvas tarpaulin held up with ropes and its four hickory poles, beside the cinderblock furnace that burned its hickory logs in the darkness. The party came after days of preparation, of pie baking, of coleslaw making, of corn husking, of general cleaning and window washing—Irving, my cousin Boyd’s best friend, traditionally came up for that job, to sit in his sleeveless undershirt and jeans, in the kitchen window, sweeping his crumpled newspaper (dark arms swinging back and forth) over the sun-shot glass, while light broke on the round lenses of his own glasses.
Labor Day weekend my cousins Dorothy and Boyd, Edward, Nanny, and Bill, Betty and Barbara, and attendant aunts and uncles were crammed in every corner of the attic, in every downstairs bedroom. And on Labor Day itself, near noon, the first car pulled up to park across the road over the old filled-in cesspool and disgorged the first of what, some years, would be as many as a hundred guests. On the backyard lawn by the ice- and soda-filled wading pool, in undershirt and apron, my Uncle Hap would whet his cleaver at the chopping block over the washtub full of pig parts and begin to hack up the barbecue—
Since my father’s death, though, the house had gone unused.
My mother decided she would make an effort to rent it out once we got to the first of the year.
“But you kids could go up and use it, if you wanted,” she told us, “while there’s still some good weather left. I really don’t feel like going, of course. But it seems a shame just to let it sit there.”
We decided that Edward (Nanny’s younger brother—though a couple of years older than I, and my closest male cousin) and I would drive up, open the house, turn on the water, check the electricity, do some cleaning, and see what was needed in the kitchen.
The following week, Nanny and Walter, Baird and Margie, Edward, Marilyn, and I would leave the Lower East Side for a weekend in the country.
A week before Labor Day, Edward got Uncle Ed’s car for a few days and we drove up to Hawthorne Circle and on across the aluminum web of the reservoir bridge, turned off on Carpenter Road, finally to cross the train tracks and, minutes later, the wooden bridge to the filling station by Kaplan’s Drugstore (its ice cream fountain, one of the few that still smelled like an ice cream fountain was supposed to, its comic book rack over the whole back wall; and Mr. Kaplan—always affable and accommodating as if he really were the thirty-five-year-old son of my fifty-five-year-old high school math teacher—the last white man we would see for a while) and on out to the house.
When we drove up the steep, quarter-mile driveway (the bulldozers, grating and roaring when I was seven, or standing silent while the drivers were off eating and I climbed up to the perforated metal seat, painted bright orange, and sat, gazing through the leaves into the sun), most of its cinder top washed away, I expected the house to look very small; the last time I’d been here my father was alive and we’d brought Louis, a compact, handsome, slow-talking kid from the General Grant Houses, who was in the remedial reading class I taught at the Community Center. He and my dad had ended up in a hot cherry pepper-eating contest, and I suddenly saw, for the first time, why someone not a part of the immediate family might think my father mild-mannered. (In the little country kitchen with its blue vinyl flooring, in his overalls, his heavy farm shoes, and his broken-brimmed painter’s cap, tall Dave, of near West Indian blackness, watched Louis and my father and shook his head: “You guys really gonna eat them things?” I saw Dave laugh.
(“Sure,” Louis said. “They good.”
(“They’re not bad,” my father said. “You want one?”
(“Naw …!” Dave declared.) But when Edward and I drove out of the trees and, through the windshield, I saw the foursquare A-frame on top of the grassy knoll, with its red brick chimney and its gray-and-black fake brick walls, it looked so much like I’d remembered, I was almost disappointed.
“Let’s go drive down to Dave’s,” I told Edward, “and get the keys.”
“Sure.” Beside me, Edward started the car again.
While we drove the dirt road, under the lowering branches, I wondered if we would find Dave, his wife Sugar, and his mother-in-law Dada sitting around the kitchen table, drinking beer and playing tonk, as they had so many summer evenings.
But only after I had gotten out of the car and was crunching across the gravel toward Dave’s screen door did some passing gossip of my mother’s, from more than a year ago, come back; Dada had died several years before.
With the keys from a shyly smiling Sugar (in her colorful West Indian-style head kerchief), we drove back to the house. As we walked up the concrete steps my father had molded and poured himself when I was eight, opened the outside screen, and turned the old-fashioned key in the brass lock on the white door, I found everything, from the sound of the hinges to—once we stepped in—the smell of the
rag rug before the hearth, achingly familiar.
Edward and I began to explore.
There was a kitchen cabinet full of thick white soup plates (out of which I’d eaten my mother’s chili when I was five) and a drawer full of bamboo place mats (which I used to hold up to my face and stare through into the striated sunlight—I lifted one now, and, even though they were wholly dry, they still gave off the same wet woody smell). My father’s stuffed pheasant was still mounted on the living room’s knotty pine wall, and the sepia print of Joe Louis fighting Billy Conn still hung over the mantel in the birch frame I’d watched Dad nail together when I was too young to know my age. In the blue bureau’s second drawer (a few flaked spots told of the years when the whole had been painted red) lay, folded into a rounded oblong, my check-style army blanket in its two unnameable shades of tan (baked bean on dusky sweet potato?), the corner, as I lifted it, bearing a small name tape, sewn neatly on both sides, “Sam Delany,” from one summer at hideous Hill-and-Dale, or from another at wonderful Woodland. Lined up in front of still another kitchen drawer were the half dozen joined salt-and-pepper shakers on their pewter bases with the black-and-white spring-release mechanisms, which, for years, had sat out on the enameled gray porch tables at my Uncle Myles’s house at Greenwood Lake, but which had somehow—probably a nostalgic gesture of my mother’s, when Aunt Dorothy, on selling their summer house, was going to throw them out with the mangy deerskin and the old wooden rack of poker chips and the brown ceramic jug with the little man’s head on the cork and the music box in the base that had once played “Show Me the Way to Go Home”—ended up here, in our kitchen drawer, beside our aluminum summer sink.
Turning on the water and electricity (now a trip to the earth-smelling cellar, now one to the resin-rich attic) took only half an hour.
The sky outside the window was going blue behind the birch trees. We’d had a big lunch before we’d left. Neither of us was particularly hungry. “Why don’t we walk down to Kaplan’s?” Edward suggested.
“And get some comics,” I added.
Which made Edward laugh—because that’s what we’d have done when we’d been here at nine, at twelve, at fourteen.
We left the house, walked down the all-but-bare cinder drive to the highway, then strolled up the shoulder the mile to the filling station and Kaplan’s, with the big floor fan still standing and humming in the corner by the prescription counter.
We looked at comics, bought ice cream sodas, walked around outside, went behind the building (which I had never done before), and saw black oil drums sitting in the tall weeds, bought a few things from the grocery next door, then went in again, and said good-night to Mr. Kaplan (“Now you give my best to your mother, when you see her. It’s so sad about your father. So sad. He was such a gentle man.”), who really did look a lot older.
When we started back up the highway (I was holding the brown grocery bag in one arm), it was cool. The sky was a deep blue, two stars already showing, and only minutes from full night—which overtook us while we walked.
I don’t know what we were talking about—perhaps the conversation had fallen to a halt.
When the headlights loomed up the road, I squinted. They veered closer—first I stopped; then, when I realized they were coming right at me, I jumped at the same time Ed pulled me to the side. (The grocery bag fell.) Under a highway light on a pole right by us, the door handle flashed its chrome not ten inches from my hip, as the car—its tires yowling now—swerved back toward the other side of the highway. We both whirled to watch, not breathing.
The car swung around sideways. The wheels flipped up, showing the crisscrossed struts of the base, and the car came to rest on its roof, wheels to the stars, some twenty-five yards down the road.
“Jesus Christ …!” I whispered. My heart thudded.
Edward said: “Nobody’s alive in that …!”
I was wondering if it was going to go up.
But Edward said, “We better go see, though.”
We sprinted toward the inverted wreck.
As we got there, just beyond another tin-shaded road light high on a phone pole, we saw an arm, with a large cuff link and sports jacket, reach out the window and feel around in the green and icy splatter of window glass. Then a head stuck out—glasses askew.
Edward squatted down to help the man. “You all right?” he asked.
I gave a hand, expecting the guy to gasp any moment from the pain of a broken leg, a shattered hip. But he got free of the upside-down car, stood up, and began to beat dust from his slacks. A pudgy white guy, maybe twenty-five or thirty, he shook his head once, adjusted his glasses, and said, “What a bitch!” He shook his head again, stepping around a little unsteadily. “What a bitch, man! What a bitch!” He made a disgusted gesture at the upside-down machine. “Best fuckin’ car I ever owned too!” He looked at Edward, at me. “Now can you believe that? Best fuckin’ car I ever owned! What a bitch!”
“You all right?” Edward asked again.
“Maybe you better sit down,” I said.
“What a bitch!” the man repeated, and looked again, disgustedly, back at the car.
Lights had gone on in one of the near houses, and a woman came out. While the driver paced and cursed, Edward reached in to turn on the headlights, which were generally pointed up the road. The woman went in to get a red emergency light, to phone someone.
Finally we started back toward the house—I picked up the grocery bag. Once we were around the next curve, Edward finally began to laugh. Soon we were both in hysterics. “In a minute it’s going to hit him what he just went through,” I said, “and he’s gonna piss on himself!”
“He’s one lucky son of a bitch!” Edward said.
We began to laugh again.
22.2. The country visit a week later is much less clear. I remember making a sixteen-inch aluminum skillet full of scrambled eggs, over the electric stove’s nested cherry rings; they took far longer to set than I’d expected.
I recall Nanny and Walter waking in the daybed, under white chenille, against the living room’s knotty pine wall; and Baird and Margie walking together toward the house through the tall grasses down the hill; and twenty-two-year-old Edward sitting down in the ancient backyard swing, with flakes of red paint still on the pipe frame, to take a great pumping kick, and the thing almost turning over—he leaped off just in time.
I remember going with Marilyn to look at the abandoned foundation that sat behind the row of pines we’d planted to hide it along the edge of our property. Half fallen in now, it was all but a garbage dump. There was an old and complex story about the place, full of strain among friends and family, with betrayals and bad feelings. The final turn of the screw was that the woman who’d never been able to complete the house on the land that no one had wanted her to have anyway had finally gone mad and was in an asylum somewhere. That, at any rate, was the tale. I remember staring up through the leaves of the bushy red maple Dad had planted in the front yard as a two-foot sapling (“Now this is going to be your tree. …”) and once I stepped outside the kitchen screen, all dappled with sun, to look at the bench we’d built between the two trees out back. A plank had been painted red, nailed to two three-inch posts driven in the ground, and the ends nailed to pieces of wood—themselves nailed to the two hickory trunks. During my childhood it had been level and fire engine bright.
Now it was all but colorless and the ends had bent up nearly three inches with the trees’ growth.
And later I sat reading in the overstuffed tatty green chair in which my grandfather had sat a dozen years before, when I’d jump from the bunk beds in my sister’s and my bedroom to run in and show him the ad on the back pages of my Judy Canova comic:
SEND ONLY 25 CENTS!
LEARN THE SECRETS OF
MESMERIC MAGIC!
HYPNOTISM!
HAVE HER IN YOUR POWER!
And to the family’s astonishment, gramps had looked into my eyes, had moved his hand—slowly—bef
ore my eyes, had told me, your eyes are getting heavy, sleep, sleep, let your eyes close, sleep … and actually managed to hypnotize me!
23. Other memories cluster loosely at that autumn, the associational bonds connecting them as uncertain as the weather, as insubstantial as a momentary play of light in yellow leaves.
23.1. Marilyn and I were coming home together one evening, and, outside the apartment door, noticed that it had not been fully closed. I pushed it in—
The refrigerator door was open. Garbage was strewn over the kitchen floor. Marilyn looked into the living room and gasped. The boards of the bookshelves had been dismantled, and the twelve-volume Shakespeare with the nineteenth-century engravings had been thrown about the room. The mattress had been pulled off the bed. And on the easy chair, a roast beef, taken from the icebox, had been left to bleed on the cushion in a few bits of its wax paper.
We’d been burglarized.
A few pieces of jewelry had been taken and—to me, the most devastating of all—the typewriter. As we began to clean up the mess, we realized the vandalism that had accompanied it was to make ascertaining the details of what had actually been stolen that much more difficult. It took two hours to get a reasonable list of what had probably been loaded into a pillowcase and carried off. We reported it—futilely—to the local police precinct, who—futilely—made a note. But for the next two days, we would discover other things that had gone with the rest.
And our door, which we had left open for more than a year without incident, we now locked.
23.2. Certainly not long after the robbery, we went to visit Baird’s stepmother up at Brewster. Rosemary was a delightful, well-tailored, if eccentric woman, on the verge of retiring from advertising, to whom all women were “gals” and all men were “fellows.” Rosemary drove through the October hills of New England—“I think we haven’t quite gotten to the leaves’ changing yet. But next week all along through here is just going to be gorgeous, I can tell you!” Baird, Margie, and Marilyn sat in the back, and I sat in the front beside her. She kept a Styrofoam coffee cup full of gin, pinkened slightly with bitters, sitting on the dashboard, from which she sipped regularly throughout the trip. “And I’ve never had an accident—oh, well, maybe one or two tiny ones. But I can’t afford any, with that in here—now, can I?”
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 25
