Braided Lives Read online

  Romantic freight trains of my childhood. Callie and I ran alongside yelling at the brakemen till they threw us pieces of chalk as big around as our starved wrists—chalk they wrote on the cars with. Best for hopscotch and writing dirty words on walls. Dreaming of oceans and mountains, I did not know our tracks were the Detroit Terminal Railroad, shunting goods from one dead end of the inner city to the other. Callie got sent up in ’61 for shooting her husband with his own police special when he threw their daughter down the stairs. I think we could make a test case of it now but then all I could do was hitchhike for a visit. She got life.

  I have walked a mile and I have another to go before I see my friend Howie. The gritty wind blows the heat and yelling of our tight house from me, at the same time that it cuts through me like a boning knife. We both live in inner city Detroit in predominantly Black neighborhoods, but mine used to be and still is somewhat Irish, Polish, Appalachian, and his used to be and still is somewhat Jewish. Going scalded to him from quarreling with my mother, I build vague tortuous expectations. I have something to tell him. What? Oh, something. A statement that will light the ash-grey sky, mesh my life and dreams, make someone, him, see me. Past the backs of factories I march with the steady thunk of pistons rattling in my knees. Hands stuffed in the pockets of a suede jacket from an old riding habit Mother bought at a rummage sale, I take comfort from the smell of stables and aging leather. I don’t even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.

  Far past the factories I turn into Howie’s neighborhood of many rooming houses. A chiropractor’s sign winks from a wide bay in the bosom of a matronly grey house. Here’s one with steamboat prow, newly painted a spanking yellow with maroon trim: TEMPLE OF TRUTH, REV. MADAME FUTURA, SPIRITUAL ADVISOR AND MYSTICAL PSYCHOLOGIST. ENTER AND FIND PEACE. Good old bulldog Howie entered and got in an argument with her secretary.

  The wrought-iron gates of the Jewish cemetery stand wide under the awkward cobblestone arch. I peek in the office window. Empty, thank you. Howie’s father is old and talking with him strains my scanty Yiddish. I am always nodding at phrases I don’t quite understand, embarrassed to pretend. Howie says, “Why should you?” but that’s worse. Excused from the gym class of the world, belonging to no team.

  Just beyond an island of hemlocks the road divides into the cluttered plain of the necropolis, grey and white as an overexposed snapshot. Necropolis. Howie taught me that word. I say it over gloatingly as I ring the bell of the house. Impatiently I ring again. If you aren’t home! I shiver with incremental cold and my calves ache. I should be wearing a winter coat but mine is a plaid in orange and purple with a decayed fur collar that belonged to my mother’s friend Charlotte. Mother and I have been skirmishing about the coat for two years. If forced to wear it out of the house to school, I leave it at a girlfriend’s house halfway. I get enough grief at school about how I dress to prefer a November-through-March head cold.

  The door opens. His face is red and puffy, making him look even younger. He is almost a year younger than I but we’re both seniors. “Jill … hey…. You startled me. I was dozing.”

  “You sleep too much.” The close heat of the living room makes my nose run. Light dies in front of the narrow windows, before the compacted plush dark. “God, it’s hot. Can we open a window?”

  “They like it hot. So I’ll grow like a potted geranium.” He ambles past flexing his arms behind his head, his square jaw pushing on his chest as he yawns. I always forget how tall he is because he hasn’t lost what his mother insists is baby fat. The outlines of his strong low-slung body and stubborn face are blurred. With difficulty I conjure you…. You had not got your own face yet. I do violence in fixing your later face to the broad but pudgy boyish shoulders. I am afraid the face I see by now is the photograph they kept reprinting. You looked when you had just turned sixteen sometimes a sullen baby, sometimes wizened against intrusion like an old man davening, sometimes bleak and sneering, fat boy who thought too much, peering in. Shaking off sleep he scrubs his knuckles against his eyes. “My mother’s taking Grandma to the doctor.”

  The furniture straining to the dark ceiling makes me fidget. “Let’s go outside.”

  We share a stone bench in the courtyard closed in by the high outer wall, the walls of office and house. I like this court where greenish urns hold withered stumps, a wheelbarrow leans against the blank office wall beside flowerpots stacked neatly in each other on the wobbly brick floor. Traffic rumble pours over the wall with a steady bass murmur like the cupped sea in a large shell. Howie talks loudly about the Aristotle he’s reading for Great Books. I first met him in a section held in the main library, before I had to quit for an after-school job. I cannot see Howie often enough, but I’ll never again see Beck, tall with curly dark hair who talked with such vehemence and wit my hands shook under the table and I could only contradict him crankily. “What’s his name—Beck?—does he still go?”

  “Sure. He’s an ass.”

  “Yeah? Beck is?” To speak his name is a stinging pleasure, but I would subside like a beached jellyfish if Howie guessed. We must allow no stickiness between us, no messages escaping my bottled inner world of itch and wonder, crush and rumor.

  “Beck turns everything around to suit his jabber. Every idea’s so simple when he gets done, you wonder why they went to the bother.” He grimaces, looking guilty at the judgment.

  I can’t keep my news back longer. “Howie, I got the scholarship to the university. It came in today’s mail.”

  “Good news.” He takes out an old but carefully kept package of Luckies, offering it. “Are you going to Ann Arbor, then?”

  “Will they let me?” I get up to pace the bricks. Howie doesn’t understand. It’s assumed in his family that he’ll go to college. He’s already accepted to Columbia. His grandmother has saved for years, put aside her husband’s insurance money for the best education they can buy him. In my family it’s all my idea. “I’ve been working summers but I’m two hundred short for the dorm. They make you live in it. Will my folks let me go? Will they give me the extra two hundred?”

  He nods grimly. “How are you getting on with your mother?”

  “Rotten. We had a fight just…” I sit down.

  “Today?” The smoke creeps under his glasses. He waves it away. “What about?” He squints at me.

  “Oh, everything. Loud and dull.”

  He blinks suspicion. “Like what?”

  I busy myself with my cigarette. “Well, you. She says it’s morbid to hang around here, because you live in a graveyard.”

  “I live in a house.” His grey eyes are blind and inturned. “That’s what I used to say in school. I thought it was clever but it never did any good. The kids told stories about me and Papa chewing on the bones.” As if for comfort he hauls out the lucky silver dollar his brother Milt brought him from Reno and fingers the eagle.

  “I know.” I do. When my childhood appears in dreams, my grade school is a prison, the kids tearing at each other in frustration and rage. It smells like piss and blood and cinders. My name Jill Stuart hangs on me queerly, prompting strangers to wonder if there was a mix-up in the hospital. I look like my mother and we both look like Jews from Kazan, where there’s a heady admixture of Tartar. In grade school the kids could not decide whether to taunt me for looking Chinese or whether simply to torture me for being a kike. There was one other Jew, a Black girl named Sarah Altweiler. The authorities used to put us on hall guard together. At age ten or eleven, the humor did not escape us. The authorities were right, we got on well together standing back to back in our common freakhood. Then I would go home where if I mentioned anything in front of Dad he would rage at me that I’m not Jewish. I learned early that I had to keep my mouth shut with him and also that everybody is somewhat crazy, except me. And Sarah, maybe. She has frizzy hair of a fascinating metallic bronze and her skin is grey satin. The way our checkered blocks are gerrymandered, she now goes to the Bl
ack high school and I go to one still mostly white. I hardly ever see her any longer. Years later of course she was the lodestar that pulled Howie South. At that funeral in Selma I stood with her.

  In hot silence Howie tosses the silver dollar, pockets it. We are alike, fat boy, skinny girl, staggering out of our brutal sickly childhoods with arms clutched full of books. How can we possibly draw comfort from each other, when we each look so unlike the stuff of dreams? I stamp out my butt and tuck it under a loose brick, bursting into what I know will draw him into safe abstract argument. “Howie, I’ve been reading Dos Passos’ U.S.A., and I think if we’d been grown-ups in the thirties, we’d both have been Communists—”

  With fare borrowed from Howie I board a bus, hollow with the drunkenness of talking too much, too passionately, with no issue. The streetlights come on making night, and I’ll get it for being late. Doggy houses crouching with your heads between your paws, you look too working class to carry any magic. I can’t imagine potent strangers behind your shades, just a geegaw lamp framed in the exact center of the window, like the one lit by now and waiting for me, still wrapped in its cellophane although four years old. Riviera Theater where I used to stand in line for Saturday matinee, two Westerns and six cartoons, and we’d hide in the john to see the adult show afterward. Now I read Freud and Marx. If I can’t escape my parents, I can classify them.

  I get off the bus into a sharp air flavored with a locomotive smell of soft coal burning from chimneys; only the better-off families have the new oil. Our street looks cluttered, the wooden two- and four-family flats with their porches banked like crossed arms, the bungalows jostled between, but it is gracious too, for every house has a square of lawn and a big shade tree. Suppertime, so no kids stand under the streetlights. No stopping to smoke a butt or pass a few jokes; no flash of guilt. I stopped hanging with my old gang when I began taking grades seriously, scribbling in my notebooks, saving for college. In all my dreams I am gone from this neighborhood, shot like a cannonball out of the narrow fear of being stuck here, knocked up early, in trouble with the law that always belonged to Them and not to Us, on the streets, fallen in the pits of drugs and booze down which I’ve already lost friends. From books I learned there is something else and I want it bad. When I talk with them I say, “I’m goin’ to the Ra-veer-a Thee-ay-ter,” for Riviera Theater, and I say, “Freddie didn’t never ball me, he can shut his lyin’ face or I’ll shut it for him.” When I talk to Howie, I talk in a way I learned off the radio. I know I am a fraud and that is part of my guilt. The rest ferments in the stories I carry inside. Everybody talks to me.

  “Jill, he gets stinky drunk every doggone Saturday and look what he done to me. He pull’t my hair from my scalp in a big ole handful and then he broke my tooth, see?” Callie opens her mouth wide, pointing.

  “Jillie, that fuckin’ john had hisself a billy club in his pocket. I thought that’s his dong at first, you know, I was rubbin on him and I said, ‘Sugar, you one well-hung dude!’”

  The truth is I have only the vaguest notion what Marcie means in biological detail but all she wants is for me to listen. My mother broke me in early to doing that; practice makes a listener who can hold eye contact all evening. And go home with my head full of bloody sorrow like the garbage cans behind the butcher’s shop.

  “Two hunert in cold cash. Two meazly hunert. I got to get it. There’s shitloads a money in numbers, Jill, I can do it if I can just get bankrolled but I owe that lying spade two hunert last week already.” That’s Freddie, who was my boyfriend at thirteen and fourteen when I ran with the gang.

  Ooops, Dad isn’t sitting in the front window with the newspaper: they’re eating. She’ll throw the kitchen at me. The streetlight shows up the chalky asbestos siding making the house ominously white and waiting. Crooked elbow of front porch waiting to grab me.

  “Mother, I’m home.” Smell of stew. Mother calls it beef stew, rich broth of succulent meat and vegetables. Dad won’t eat lamb. I only found out I like lamb when the butcher got a new assistant and yelled at him, “No, she wants the usual stew meat for Stuart, that’s the lamb.”

  “Mother,” I repeat, “I’m home.” Let’s get it over. She stands in the kitchen washing glasses from the upper shelves, used only for company. Why? She thrusts a towel at me.

  I do not speak in hope of avoiding a quarrel. Instead I try to pretend I do not notice the angry glint of her dark eyes, the menacing clatter in the sink. My shoulders hunch. The top of her glossy black always unruly hair comes to my chin, although I’m only five foot four. In spite of her floppy washdress splashed with bleached petunias, in spite of the cheap bras she wears limp before cutting down for me, in spite of a craving for sugar exceeded only by a craving for melodrama, her figure is impressive. Fat pads out the curves extravagantly—houri arch of hips and buttocks, pronounced waist, major pride of breasts. Her hands and feet are small and often swollen. Eyes dark as mine. Both with small straight noses. Her mouth is a Cupid’s bow of which she is vain, deploring big mouths like mine. Her voice is low and pleasant but capable of great stridence. This is a house where everyone yells.

  You see a plump coy energetic doll with mincing gait. I see the Great Devouring Mother, ogress big as a horizon sitting on my head. “Your father,” she begins, words always italicized, “is not home yet. Of course he hasn’t called. We’ll eat at midnight. Men! They think the food grows on the table, just pops out of the wood like toadstools from the ground.”

  Dad works for the city servicing the trolleys and trolleybuses the city is gradually replacing with buses (as part of what appears from this late vantage point as a master plan for destroying its public transportation). He is shop steward for his union and the senior wizard with the reputation of making any piece of junk run a day longer. My stomach growling, I keep looking for the stew, for it is not on top of the stove. The stove has been scrubbed immaculate and there is no food on it at all. Our hatbox kitchen is surprisingly modern, bristling with electric frypans and electric can openers with a huge slab of refrigerator lording it over the wobbly old table. Dad has no more ability to resist buying an electric shoe polisher than my mother does to resist a shocking pink two-dollar rummage sale sweater in size 14 that can surely be made to fit me if I put on fifty pounds.

  I scan the last dusk for Dad’s car to pull into the drive. It looks as if Mother has been digging up the edges of the lawn again for vegetables, putting out the first hardy seeds. She can make anything grow under the fall of the acid chemical rain from the yellow-brown skies of industrial Detroit. My father cherishes only grass, which means respectability to him, and they fight a war as long as the growing season, him running the lawn mower over her plants, her stealing a few inches by widening her beds. My skinny body is convulsed with hunger cramps. I try to think of the great ascetics, but the air is moist with the stew.

  “Where did you go when you barged out of here?”

  “For a walk.”

  “What did your friend Howie have to say?” She pulls the stopper and the soapy water goes slurping down.

  No use denying. “He’s reading Aristotle for Great Books.”

  “What makes them great? The filth?”

  “That was Aristophanes who wrote the play you got mad at. You know sex is a part of living, so what’s wrong with writing about it?” When I was younger, Mother read my books with me, but somewhere between Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Brave New World, we parted company, and we have not forgiven each other. She is a compulsive reader who brings home armloads from the Gabriel Richard Public Library every two weeks, which she consumes late at night. A vast hunger for something. That same hunger that terrifies her in me. She is scared of the world and thinks if she punishes me first, I will be broken down enough to squeak through.

  “Was Howie’s mother home?”

  “His father was.” Anyway, he was probably around, out in the cemetery. I lie automatically.

  “In the house?”

  “In the office. Anyway we w
ent outside.”

  “Because his dad was inside?”

  “Because they keep the house too hot.”

  With a flirt of her head she shakes the hair from her eyes. “Howie’s a sensible boy. You don’t catch him running over here. Real Jewish boys mind their mothers.”

  “What’s his mother got to do with it? This house is too small.”

  “Too small for what? You can entertain in the front room.”

  “You always listen.”

  “What have you got to say you’re ashamed your own mother should hear?” As she sets the table I stand with clenched fists backed out of her way against the newspapers heaped waiting for her to go through to clip weird news stories for her collection. She lilts on in a sugar and vinegar voice, “Run, lie to Howie about how I mistreat you, because he’ll believe you till he gets to know you better.”

  This is stupid. I want to walk out with a cool yawn and read the paper, but I cannot tear myself from her. Younger I used to say, I tell everything to my mother: she would turn me out like her purse down to the crumbs and pennies. Now we live at war, our reconciliations brief and aching with sore love and rancid mistrust, one of us always shouting betrayal. “You think I have nothing to talk about but you? You aren’t my universe.”

  “Your universe! Your pigsty!”

  Imitation tough guy grin on my face I back against the papers. “Inside. The one place you can’t pry.”