by John Domini
And so I borrowed a page from your stepfather; he’s quite the prize muckraker, o yes; and I called a Women’s Crisis Center. After all it was a woman I’d come to Providence to find. It couldn’t very well have been a man, could it, this person who used to love my father.
She was an unusual woman, my father’s lover, though she was also, well. She was one of us—one of our kind—with the same lapsed-Episcopal pretensions as the rest of us: the jean skirts and the nic fits. She too had gone half-blind before the endless slides of Art History, and she too was forever stopping by the mailbox to see if there wasn’t another check from home; and our paths crossed occasionally, you see, our charts overlapped (though you should understand, my baby, that this was before the proliferation of Women’s etc., a significant absence)… Though you should understand, she was unusual; she was only a year older than me, a year “ahead” of me, but already this girl possessed—at least, among us lapsed Episcopalians—a rare sense of how she was going make her way: a rare, unsullen practicality about her likes and dislikes, and about their funding. And yet she was one of us: she met my father when they shared the same seat-row on the North Shore commuter train.
Now, I came to recognize this woman’s difference, her rarity, not simply because she had an affair with my father, no; also, shortly thereafter, I myself fell into a period I’ve come to call The Rampage.
More tabloids. That Bette’s father should have cheated was shock enough. The man had never made much of an impression, compared to the likes of Cousin Cal. On him, Bette’s long-boned paleness looked watery. The father had a Vice Presidency at First Boston and an avocation for Scottish genealogy. On one wall of his den hung a framed letter from some Edinborough regimental society. Yet the news about “Fudds”—a regular sex machine, that Fudds—wasn’t the real surprise in today’s printout. What shook Kit more was that his wife should bring up, for the second time in less than a week, The Rampage. The Rampage, an in-the-bedroom version of trashing the family garden, picking the men up and putting them down.
In the photos Kit had seen from that time, his wife-to-be had worn her hair like a helmet. She’d thrust out one cowgirl hip as if it were the edge of an axe. Battle-ready. Kit lowered the printout, thinking back to the letter she’d left him last Tuesday. She’d mentioned Ivan, then. One of the very few I’ve kept in touch with. Very few, to put it mildly. Bette had gone most of their marriage without bringing up Ivan or any of her other one- and two-nighters from that time. Kit would’ve thought she’d never wanted to hear about The Rampage again.
The Rampage, The Rampage!—oh, don’t the “Cut” and “Paste” keys make it easy—The Rampage, The Rampage! “Cut” and “Paste:” just the thing for lacerations, my baby. Indeed as I consider it now, as I consider my wounds, I think that perhaps you would’ve done better to discuss this, um, “difficult period” (The Rampage!) with your stepfather, if you’d ever known your stepfather. He could have handled the subject more objectively, your handsome prince of a stepfather; he might even go so far as to say there was a prince or two before him; whereas your mother, my baby, your mother can’t think of them as princes. She finds this far too packed and painful a corner of the world for princes, your mother.
Oh, who shall I mention? perhaps that violent French post-doc who’d studied with Roland Barthes?—absolutely chockfull of theories, he was, and gifted with an innate fucker’s rhythm besides, but you had to watch him once he’d cracked the absinthe, you had to make sure there was someone else in the apartment. My baby, when I think of my Rampage partners, it’s like the old song: No way my prince will come—no way, not even if he’s that sweet teenage drug fiend who later turned up in Aerosmith: a wild thing on stage but a cuddly stuffed teddy bear off it (because you see he was far too much of teddy bear, all soft and marble-eyed) … Yes, your mother believes she ran a shameful gamut: shameful, rather predictable really, and utterly devoid of princes. Your mother’s starting to think this entire section should be redone; I scroll back up the screen and I can’t help thinking of your stepfather. One marvels at the man. Before I came upon his muckraking, I’d never thought that mere newsprint could carry such fervor; my baby, you’d have done better to discuss this with him.
But your mother, well. I’m starting to think I should have confined my input to more subtle business: to my schoolgirl self and the others who crossed the quads with me—to the whole intricate process by which “one of us” came of age. Your mother should never have mentioned her wicked past, because the mystery that matters is nothing so sensational; the mystery that matters is this other girl, the one with the unsullen practicality etc., who fell in love with my father. You need to know, you and your stepfather both—you need to understand how one of us came of age, and how my father’s one turned out, in the end, different. Let’s see … there was that thing she said to Hildreth that time Peggy and Alison were talking about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and then there was the way Hildreth reported what she’d said, the angle of her smile (I mean Hildreth’s smile) and the way she (Hildreth again) wagged her bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, and then there was that time while Megan and I were waiting for her boyfriend (Megan’s boyfriend) to call and I myself brought up the Patty Hearst affair, and the particular angle of the irony I gave to what I said by repeating what this woman (Our Woman Now In Providence) had said … let’s see.
A subtle business, isn’t it, my baby? O, subtle—o, silliness. There were a thousand thousand faint shadings and shifts in how one of us came of age, don’t you know; there’s a veritable War and Peace to be written about us, the New England Natashas; it would include even the palest prism in a sunstruck dorm window on that long afternoon when, say, the ’60s shaded into the ’70s…
Am I playing games, here at my Apple? playing giddy teen games after all? I came to this with something serious to say: I’d decided that you were born out of my father’s affair.
I think I’ll name the woman Dee, as in Dee-lete.
Now Dee was well into Med School the last she and I spoke—that is, not long after her fling with old Fudds—and she intended to work in obstetrics (small world), and so you see at the Providence Women’s Crisis Center (new world), all your mother needed to do was ask whether there were a Doctor Dee in town. A Doctor Dee, you see, because the at-home Dee clearly had an unlisted number—something your mother’s been thinking of getting herself, lately … At any event le Centre du Crise proved remarkably helpful, and I couldn’t help but think of your stepfather, again: forever helpful and sincere and, unlike your mother, perfectly direct. Yes direct: that’s Dee, Ayy, Arrgh .
By now Kit was out of his coat and into nightclothes. Dry clothes, even warm—the bureau stood beside the radiator. The pieces of the gun ended up on top of the bureau, beside the photo of his father. He left the Percodan up there too, still untouched. Through all this Kit never lost the thread of his wife’s thinking. Her previous letter had seemed to him written in another language, if not another medium, but now it seemed he could handle a more complex wave-pattern. But that was also precisely what hurt: how well he and Bette knew each.
The entire weekend’s been like that, don’t you know, I’ve been forever thinking of some third party even in the midst of trying to reach my second party … Indeed such distractions have been buzzing about my head for longer than that: there’s a certain Ms., yes Mzzzz, a real bee in my bonnet (your stepfather will know who I mean [if I am in fact doing this input for him]); and there’s been another ghost about, lately, another half-mad apparition out of mean times (and shall I nest one clue inside another again? [you really should read this, stepfather]).
Ivan, Kit figured. The “mean times” were the Rampage, and Ivan certainly qualified as half-mad. He was the one who’d told Bette about the psychic.
You know just last week I visited, well, a medium? A woman who speaks with ghosts?—looking for you, my baby, looking for my little lost loup-garou: that’s why I went. Mysteries have their solutions, God knows, and
that goes for the mystery of my visiting a medium, too; I got the idea when that other ghost in my life started to groan over the phone (o, how he does groan, over the phone) … and last week I lacked the strength to search out my real Mrs. Dee, my real mystery (o, you input imp!) … and so I began to think of you, my baby. I began to look for you—though first, wouldn’t you know it, in-Dee-rectly. In unlikely places.
But then it was also an unlikely place, unlikely indeed, to which my father’s adultery had brought me originally. Unlikely past, unlikely present. I knew about my Fudds’ carrying on of course—He & Dee were no mystery, no, not to an old Tormented Teen snooper like myself, a muckraker to rival your stepfather, really; I began with a phone number scribbled on the stub of a train ticket, and in no time I was eavesdropping on the conversation between Fudds and a certain powerful Old Boy who lent them his Duxbury hideaway (a man, I might mention, not without some power and fame even yet) for fucking. But what I’m trying to get at today, well. This isn’t simply about fucking, my baby, about fucking and finding the clues; rather it’s about the unlikely place I’ve been brought to now—a reflection, you see, of what I was brought to then—because briefly I found myself with quite another father, then, quite a different breed of man; and I liked it.
I liked it, Tormented Teen guerrilla that I was, that I am; I dug up my father’s dirty secrets because I wanted to do damage, I wanted to chart every one of my family’s soft spots—but then those very same secrets revealed my dad to be doing the damage himself: he liked it, he was the guerrilla. He even began to play roof-ball (is there roof-ball where you are, my baby? the tatty old tennis ball careening from gable to gable crazily before dropping back towards the players, towards a score?). After dinner he’d play roof-ball with my brother, my sister—even with me, a fellow family monster, a hesitant secret sharer … and he was tall enough to be a formidable opponent, on those spring evenings before the humidity wore him down. My sweet uncomplicated child, can you understand? can you suss out the subtle business at work here, the complex and unlikely challenge to the world that I saw in my high-hairlined Fudds, thanks to the complex and unlikely project by which I came of age … My other parent, don’t you know, never appeared in such a heroic light: your mother’s mother, my baby, only went on bending between her roses, her peonies, her gladiolas, her foxgloves (even now she goes on, honestly), all in a humming, loam-spotted oblivion. My father, on the other hand, looked as though he could fly, he could bounce from gable to gable all summer long (o, metaphor!); and it only added that much more to the thrill, don’t you see, because I was the only one who knew—a little more than kin, and less than kind (o, allusion!). I liked it, my baby, I quite reveled in my father’s cheating and the new breed of cat it made of him, of me: two smiling sphinxes who shared the same riddle—and so, don’t you see, I was let down badly, hurt worse than I knew, to hear him declare, one evening in the height of the June-wedding season, that he was tired.
Too tired, he declared, as I stood before him tossing and catching the dirty little ball we’d been playing with for weeks now …
Too tired, he sighed, and he put up the closely printed wall of the Wall Street Journal: too tired, and (soggily rattling the ice in his glass) he’d love another gin & tonic, with a little more gin in it this time …
Now, my baby (and anyone else who might be on the other side of the screen [aw, come on, as your stepfather would say])—now, would it be an exaggeration, would it be rather a sensational exaggeration, if your mother were to say that she went to the family liquor cabinet, that evening, and came back in a Rampage? if she were to say that she fetched her father his damn triple-gin & tonic and then after that, for months to come (interesting word!), she didn’t drink with a man she didn’t fuck? if she were to say that the next conversation she had of any length and substance was the time towards the end of The Rampage, The Rampage! when she deliberately tried to hurt Dee as hard as she could, by letting the girl know, in no uncertain terms, how much the Steyes family likes to fuck?
“Aw, darling,” Kit said. Bette’s agonies unwound like a shell, in slow spirals, and yet they felt like too much too fast. He was still wondering who would groan on the phone. He stood to put in toast and set the kettle on a burner. What he was reading, Kit reminded himself, was the kind of life’s partner he’d asked for. A know-it-all with depth, with reach.
My baby, tiny and dead though you are, well. I’m sure you realize that I first searched out another clue or two, Teen Detective, in order to confirm my suspicions that dear old Fudds’ affair had indeed ended; you realize, I’m sure, that I couldn’t simply leave that laceration alone. I first made certain that my father no longer went traipsing off on his dubious overnight “presentations” (in Duxbury, mon pere?); and after that while I can’t recall, here before this gray grid, just when I moved into my angry little studio on Dana Street, nonetheless the answer is yes, I mean the answer to the question your mother was just asking …
Yes! I went directly to my Rampage! Yes, in that candid moment over my father’s gin-&-Journal I understood that the man was no longer a campeñero, that he was in fact just another tin-star dictator with blood on his hands and a happy banana …
Examples, God knows I have examples. I have irrefutable evidence that nine-tenths of what I said and did in those days was all about me and my father. Yes, the answer’s yes, and our mother could regale you with ugly evidence indeed, with incidents draped in transparent Freudian slips (o, games), incidents that go from backstage at a bar where Aerosmith had a gig to upstairs in the Parker House with a prominent State House Old Boy. This weekend, thanks to my little talk with Dee down in Providence, honest hindsight at last revealed that throughout this entire incident-packed period (interesting word!), I was after my father—whether after fucking him or killing him, or both … well. Hoo boy, as your stepfather would say (o, yoo hoo, my prince! yoo hoo! [but the truth is he won’t be home for hours, my baby; I’ve got plenty of time left to Delete])
The truth is, even at my most outrageous, my most Rampageous, I was just another rebel rich girl, wasn’t I? Even out on the astral plane you’ve come across the type, haven’t you? Bright but lacerated nucleii, aren’t we, grubby little handfuls struggling for greater mass against the fracturing effects of shame … My weekend journey to find you, and then my sitting here to put you into words, these are both mysteries, don’t you know—but I do wonder whether, in the end, there exist any mysteries about personality at all, these days. I do wonder if we haven’t had the mystery charted and graphed out of us, these days: nailed like Natasha into Tolstoyan immutability.
Kit followed her more with his spine than his head. He trusted his spine, and the soggy beehive hanging from it.
He trusted, as well, better sensations: the warmth of tea, full-bodied herbal stuff Bette bought in Central Square, and toast. With the sardines back at the office, it was better nourishment than he’d had in weeks. More than that, Kit thought he understood. He believed he’d figured out this “my baby” business. He wasn’t reading about adultery, or not his wife’s anyway. She hadn’t had an abortion over the weekend either.
When I at last caught up with Dee, don’t you know, she too seemed no mystery; rather she seemed the natural end result of a progression already sketched on the air at the time of our last conversation—sketched so plainly (o, history without mystery) that nothing had changed, for Dee, even though she’d rushed out of our last conversation in tears. I mean, here she was in hospital fatigues, working the Sunday shift in Emergency Trauma at Good Samaritan, in hospital fatigues and an unpretentious wedding diamond, with her hair in a sensible bob … She knew her likes and dislikes and their funding, my baby; she showed no trace of how hard I’d once tried to hurt her.
Myself on the other hand, God knows, I must have looked like rather a case, when dear old Dee first laid eyes on me… Indeed, the foremost victim of The Rampage, The Rampage! (after myself, myself!) didn’t recognize me, until I called her by her Cliff
ie nickname. Indeed, her first once-over—before I spoke her name—made it perfectly clear just what sort of a case she saw in me, with my Newbury Street curls and coat, my Sunday eyeliner: she saw another pampered and overcomplicated troublemaker: another rebel rich girl.
Then with her Cliffie nickname, I became three-dimensional, just like that, out of her file folder and into her heart—or more precisely, into her craw. She became angry, did Dee, frowny, and no one can frown quite like a startled woman in a gymnast’s haircut, a startled doctor at a busy station, demanding an explanation: Where are you hurt?
O, Dee, sticks and stones may break my bones, but it’s these old names that really hurt me. They ooze, they itch—for as you’ve no doubt figured out by now, my baby, I needed to ask this woman about, well. About the past, our mutual past; and naturellement, that’s what I began to see before me, right there in the Trauma Center: no sooner did some clumsy euphemism for The Rampage come from my mouth, “um, that time when I was um, more than usually sexually active”—no sooner did I mention it than I was back in it, in the worst and meanest moment of it: back the night I’d invited Dee over to the studio, back not long after too-tired Fudds had walled himself up behind his Wall (for good, I might add; he hasn’t come out since). I was back taking a night off from my Oedipal Rampaging (it’s all charted and graphed, isn’t it?) and instead steering my girl talk, my cheerful girl talk with my dear old chum Dee, well—steering our conversation towards intimate particulars.
I was cunning, in those days: little Miss Cunning Stunts … Dee brought herbal tea, she introduced me to herbal tea, and I made certain that she had a firm and thorough understanding of my situation before we’d finished our second cup. I can handle a word like “clitoris,” don’t you know, with a sang-froid that’s nothing short of clinical—though in that regard I’m hardly unique, am I, not when the Cambridge Adult Education Center is offering seminars like The Problem of Orgasm. My baby, you wouldn’t believe our ‘70s silliness: women actually refer to climax as “the big O”…
