Braided Lives Read online

  “If you’re this bad now, this defiant, what’d you be like if we sent you to college? You just want to get out of working and paying us back.” Eyes lit up with that hard glint. I can’t look that fierce; I know because I’ve tried before the mirror. Her fists prance between us. One step more and I’ll sprawl on the papers. “You’ve had it easy. If you had to slave like me. Even your father finally sees through you. You used to be able to twist him around your finger, but—”

  “I only want to be left alone! You want me a baby locked in a playpen. Whenever I like someone, you try to ruin it!”

  “Like you? They laugh at you behind your back! Friends? How dare you slam out of here and go sneaking around a graveyard doing God-knows-what all day leaving me with a house to clean and then parade around in front of me giving yourself airs about friends!”

  My tensions go all to silly laughter and I slide back, flailing for balance. Screaming she gropes on the table and scoops up a cup, sends it flying. I drop on the papers as the cup strikes the wall spraying shards of crockery. The grade door opens. I stop laughing and we both freeze. A look of quick complicity: the auslander comes. I scramble to my feet, sweeping fragments of cup under the papers, while she rushes to the cupboard for a new one.

  Still he heard something. As he opens the door he looks swiftly at her and then hard at me, his grey eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses cold and weighing. His deep voice is devoid of inflection. “Where’s supper? I got held up at the shop.”

  If she takes the quarrel to him, he will squash it in a moment and me too. But she bustles round him, her voice an octave higher. “Malcolm, I’m sorry, I’m awfully sorry, but you know I couldn’t start supper. Now I’ll throw something together. Why don’t you glance at the paper? I’ll have it ready in a jiffy, some nice hamburgers.”

  Imperceptibly, I hope, I step backward and press the lever on the garbage can just enough to look inside. My stomach leaps. O lost and luscious stew still steaming on the brown paper.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE COWBIRD EGG IN THE EAGLES’ NEST

  WE SIT CRAMPED around the table. Our three chairs are jammed between chimney and basement door in space that a large chair would fill. This is a house built for people for whom respectability meant owning a house, but who couldn’t finance more than a packing crate. Even tonight, however, the wobbly legs of the table bear up poorly under the load of side dishes: two kinds of bread, jellied beets, mashed potatoes, hamburgers and for dessert home-canned peaches and apple cake baked before our quarrel.

  “Don’t pick at your food!” Mother heaps my plate with potatoes made in a hurry, burned on the bottom and full of small hard lumps. “Eat!”

  I feel too close to their elbows, exposed to the blast of their whims. At the first suspicious glance my appetite withers. Scrawny would-be changeling, at four I sat forever before a plate of cold congealing goo, condemned to stare at the orange o’s of canned carrots until I got them down, threw them up or snuck them into the garbage. Twenty-five years later the smell of canned spinach or overcooked peas, the sight of the slime-mold shapes of commercial gelatin can force a rush of acid up my throat. Fortunately in the life of a food snob such encounters are rare, but I still eat too fast.

  In words of ritual I could intone with him, Dad says with heavy jocularity, “I see you served a little meat with the onions, Pearl.” (Plaintive.) “I can’t see fogging up the natural taste of beef with that Eyetalian greenery.”

  (Arch.) “I just put a dash in for flavor.” (Martyred.) “I swear I don’t know why I slave to set a good table plenty of men would give their eyeteeth for and nothing but carping for reward.”

  Dad calls himself a meat-and-potatoes man and tries to ignore the stomach he passed on to me, organ of emotion and only secondarily of digestion. Between Mother and me all is touch and wrestle, the love and hate thrust into relief. Between Dad and me feelings mass themselves amorphous but lowering. His hair turned silver early. His brows loom and hairs bristle from his deep bony nose and glint on the back of his long fine deeply scarred hands, stained as his teeth with nicotine. The moments at the table as he wolfs down his food and drinks his cup of black coffee are the only times I ever see him without a cigarette. When he rises from sleep where snores break shuddering from him, I hear him in the morning hacking as he stumbles to his dresser and then the rasp of a match as he lights his first butt. He is a Celt who wants to be a Wasp and treats his emotions like mice that infest our basement or the rats in the garage, as vermin to be crushed in traps or poisoned with bait. He will keep the peace if he can, but once roused, his temper cleaves the house. Then he strikes out with fists and feet, hitting and kicking hard so that what he shatters then cannot be mended. When he hits me, he always leaves bruises.

  Dad comes from a small town. His mother spoke Welsh as my buhbe spoke Russian and Yiddish; and as my mother almost never speaks Yiddish, my father claims to know no Welsh. If I know any Yiddish, it is because my buhbe always spoke it when we were alone, and until she died last year when I was fifteen, she always spent half the summer with us. My father’s father kept a dry-goods store and although through his wife he was related to half the out-of-work miners in the country, he never let it queer his books. My mother, my father, they are the halves of two worlds that don’t mix or even balance. Over the two families the same sky does not hang nor the same earth stretch underneath.

  Mother was born of immigrant Russian Jews and grew up in the slums of four cities. She had seven brothers and four sisters, born before her eyes with the help of local midwives. At fifteen she had to leave school to go to work. At sixteen she married. At seventeen she was a widow. Her first husband Sam, just a year older, had a job at Carnegie Steel. When he fell into the molten ore, the company sent her an ingot to bury. She moved back the six blocks to her family just in time for my grandfather to be shot by Pinkertons. He was a union organizer. So my mother married Max Abel, a Philadelphia businessman steady and fifteen years older, and began to give her mother money.

  Mother was still married to Max Abel when Dad met her, long a bachelor with the pleasures of cronies and barrooms and the loneliness of furnished rooms. How can I conjecture the bolt of lightning not unlike his temper that transfigured him to love her? Mistrust is mixed with their love and they fascinate each other in a stymied grappling years have confused but not eased. They fled Philadelphia for Detroit into the full onslaught of the Depression, convinced that it was their personal punishment. Love, the cannibal, presided over my cradle; it is small wonder I am scrupulous with my dinner.

  They squabble still about how Mother takes her coffee sweet and light and Father takes his black. They are doing that halfheartedly and poking at the mass of papers on the table, the announcement of my scholarship, the forms I must fill out for the university on dormitory preference.

  “Dormitory.” Mother gives the papers a cuff. “Like a hotel?”

  “They have hours, Mother. It’s girls only. They lock us in at night.” I try to short-circuit what I guess is her path of thought. She once worked as a chambermaid and associates hotels with drunken salesmen trying to corner her.

  “Humpf. Wayne is a very good school. You just hop on a bus and you’re there.”

  “Two buses.”

  The phone rings. Mother leaps up to pounce on it. “Leo!” I hear her moan. “It’s Leo!” she tells us, eyes dancing. “I’ll accept the charges, operator.”

  “Ask him how the underwater lot business is going,” I say, but softly. Leo is my oldest brother. Both my brothers are Max’s sons but Max has nothing to do with them. Leo’s thirty, living in Toledo across the state border so he won’t have to pay child support. I think he would have been rich long ago—the only passion I’ve ever discerned in him although he does keep marrying and marrying—but he’s somehow too slippery even to hold on to his money. I like my brother Francis better, whom they call Frankie. At thirty, Leo is balding and portly and wears three-piece business suits that always look as if he
borrowed them from somebody twenty pounds thinner. Francis has more style, but let’s face it, it’s gambler’s style.

  At twenty-seven when Francis comes home and walks down the street with me, the girls who don’t know him yet all ask who my cute boyfriend is. He wears a loud shirt under a leather jacket and I remember his pegged pants and his zoot suit of a few years ago. I adore him, he can melt the heart in me to pure chocolate with a wink, but I wouldn’t trust him with a five-dollar bill if I locked him in the bathroom with it. He’d smoke it if he couldn’t lose it on a horse or a fight or a poker game. Francis has no luck. Everybody knows that but him. I can’t quite trust him with secrets either. Unlike Leo, he loves me, I think, but Mother can turn him upside down and empty the pockets of his soul till my secrets come tumbling out along with his. I was a consummate flirt when I was younger but I have lost the knack and at sixteen he is the only man I flirt with.

  “You did! That’s wonderful,” Mother burbles. She turns to us. “Leo’s gone into the paint business! He got a whole carload of paint dirt cheap.” She turns back to the phone. “You’re right on the ball, Leo, that’s my darling. Everybody paints their house in the spring. Why, we have to paint inside ourselves…. Of course you can. When are you coming home?”

  Singed with jealousy, I rise to sneak out. Dad stops me, clearing his throat. He has put on the reading glasses that don’t correct his farsightedness and is holding the application at arm’s length. “What is this about Donna going to the U. of Michigan also?”

  “I guess so.” Donna is his brother Hubie’s youngest girl. Donna Stuart. “She wrote me she was going.”

  “Did she ask you to live with her in this whatever-it-is, rooming house?”

  “She mentioned it,” I say reluctantly. Getting away from the family is more what I had in mind.

  “It’s good to be with kin.” He frowns at the application. He is also listening to the conversation with Leo.

  I take the moment to skip out. I’ll be called back for dishes fast enough. We have only two bedrooms and mine still looks as it did when Leo and Francis shared it—bunk beds, two dressers in one of which Mother keeps sewing supplies and out-of-season clothes. The door that looks like a closet leads up to the attic, where I am headed. That is my sanctuary. The bedroom I share with a busy sewing machine and a mangle and the things that belong to my brothers and Grandma when she visited has been mine since I was six but it has never felt private. The attic does.

  Stifling hot in summer, close to freezing in winter, a scene of boxes piled on boxes, this is my dusty heaven. Running from the back window, which looks down on our tiny yard full of flowers and clotheslines, to the chimney is my room. The barriers were imaginary around my doll beds. Boxes formed walls for those girls’ clubs I used to instigate, imitating books; they never met but once and that meeting always taken up with making lists of all the girls we wouldn’t ask because of snotty wrongs they’d done us, Callie and Shirley and me. Last year Dad put up beaverboard partitions. For weeks an unfinished door leaned outside; finally I took it in and standing across several boxes it serves as my desk. My books, my chair, my glider (late of the front porch). Mine, mine, mine.

  The rafters are the ceiling. Three walls are white. I ran out of paint so the fourth is stuck full of tacks to hold my gallery of reproductions clipped from Life, an arty Christmas card and maps, blueprints of escape. Love’s body spread-eagled on the walls, red roads, black roads. New York, Paris, Athens, veins and nipples, loins and valleys of the abundant and mysterious world, I will come!

  On the satisfyingly grainy flat of my desk in a welter of library books is my current notebook, full of poems scrawled with careful illegibility so their heresies cannot be spied (themes running heavily to death, unrequited passion and escape). I keep lists of classical music I hear and books I read and words that impress me (plangent, autodidact) not for the pleasure of lists, for little about me is orderly, but because the world of art and literature and ideas is a four-dimensional maze where I struggle a few turns from the entrance.

  List of MEN WHOM I ADMIRE:

  KARL MARX

  LEON TROTSKY (I am not sectarian)

  MOZART

  GANDHI

  LORD BYRON

  PICASSO

  MR. STEIN (My English teacher. I have written a sonnet sequence to him. He allows my sweated worship.)

  GARIBALDI

  ADLAI STEVENSON

  VAN GOGH

  FRANÇOIS VILLON

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  BUDDHA

  N. BECK (ass?)

  FRANZ SCHUBERT

  J. S. BACH

  LEONARD BERNSTEIN

  TECUMSEH

  MY GRANDFATHER DAVID HABENSKI

  MARLON BRANDO

  ALDOUS HUXLEY

  I started a matching list of WOMEN WHOM I ADMIRE:

  MY AUNT RIVA (I crossed her out when she visited us last year and sided with my mother.)

  SACAJAWEA

  GEORGE SAND (I can’t find any of her books in the library but I read about her in a biography of Chopin.)

  ZIPPORA MENDEL (A sabra I met at the main library in the card catalog room. She had been a soldier and was studying to be an engineer.)

  EMILY DICKINSON (Her poetry stuns me and she would understand about the attic.)

  That’s it. I feel embarrassed. I am tempted to add Eleanor Roosevelt and Florence Nightingale but truthfully I am not desirous of becoming either. Every so often I try to add to that list, for whenever I contemplate it, it makes me feel dreary.

  Tucking my hands between my thighs for warmth, I lie on the glider. I scarcely distinguish work and reverie, for all my projects—poems, notes, diary, dreams, reading—seem part of the same clandestine nether world. Does it really exist someplace? I spend a lot of time adjusting novels and biographies I read to invent roles for myself, which takes ingenuity for a female Hamlet or a female Count of Monte Cristo taxes my inventiveness. Hamlet gets to hog the whole play, emoting in wonderful soliloquies I can quote by heart and brandishing a sword and running somebody through from time to time, but all Ophelia gets is the mad scene and a mouthful of waterweed. This difficulty is a lump I cannot dislodge in the middle of my mind. I cannot imagine myself one of those Others I am curious about but largely ignorant of.

  Girls when they talk to boys become different. The voice, the expression, the way of laughing and talking and standing of my girlfriends alter; they express different ideas and even their gait changes. I do not know if I cannot or will not do that; I only know I am afraid. Marriage does not figure in the tales I tell myself. I see it daily and it looks like a doom rather than a prize. Mother is always saying Riva was a dancer, but then she got married; Charlotte was a buyer for Crowley’s, but then she got married. Glory and adventure are the prizes. And love. I despise my hunger for affection.

  Loving is not exotic since I’ve always been in love with somebody and not infrequently somebody had a crush on me, although the two longings haven’t coincided since age eight, unless you count Callie. I try not to.

  I was eleven when an older girlfriend now on the streets hustling with Marcie seduced me. “Let’s play house,” she said and showed me how. In the next years I discovered that just about any of my girlfriends would play that game. I knew it was bad, but so were two thirds of our amusements. It did not seem worse than shoplifting from Woolworth’s or looking through our mothers’ drawers or letting air out of Old Man Kasmierov’s tires because he called the cops when we skated on his smooth new driveway or filching cigarettes from our fathers’ pockets and smoking them in the basement at school. It was casual sex, although I didn’t know it was sex at all. At the same time we argued about exactly what men did to women and where babies came out. What boys did to you was real sex, scary, fascinating, murky.

  Callie was my best friend from seventh through ninth grades. I seduced her in 7A. Alone of the girls she never called Sarah or me kike when she got mad. They called her a hillbilly. We went around togethe
r arm in arm talking about boys and went to the movies and cut out pictures of singers and actors to worship. I tried to do her homework regularly so she’d pass with me, but she felt more and more resentful of school. Callie talked Southern and the teachers gave her a hard time. She never had milk money or the other coins they pried out of us for savings bonds. Callie dressed what they called inappropriate. So did I, but my hand-me-downs were drab and attracted no attention unless the other white girls wanted to torture me. Callie’s were from her older sister who worked as a cocktail waitress. Callie was always coming to school with or without a safety pin holding together décolleté that would in any case reveal nothing but rib cage.

  Suddenly I writhe on the glider. When I was twelve I was given a new red nylon sweater for my birthday, which I wore to school. Nylon sweaters were new and cheap and bright and I was proud, for I’d never had anything like it. In the john, two girls held me down and took it off so the others could see if I was wearing falsies. The rest of the day the boys kept trying to pinch me. I was too ashamed to wear the sweater to school again.

  I was stuck on Callie. I could not touch her that often without attachment, without emotion, without love. Is she good enough for me? I asked myself when I was feeling smart. Am I good enough for her? I asked when I was ashamed of my treacherous longings to get up and out of the neighborhood, when I had shown off in class, whenever I got 100 on a test she flunked. Callie was my little low down nest of belonging. I came to her with my sores and I tried to stand between her and the scorn that rapped against her daily. I nagged her to behave.

  We were both running with the gang, but nobody knew of our secret attachment. What words did we have for it? It was as furtive as the fact that we both still sometimes played with our old dolls; as furtive as when Aunt Riva gave me a Valentine heart of chocolates and I shared it only with Callie, not with the gang; as furtive as the time Callie put on her mother’s bra, stuffed it with tissues, painted her face and strolled along Grand River collecting wolf whistles and dragging me hunched over behind her clumping like a broken wagon.