Braided Lives Page 6

  Mother wants to unpack me, but parting makes Dad fidget. While they argue, Donna bats between them, joking nervously, and when we are left alone laughs even more frantically, trying so desperately to present a scatterbrained simple blithe facade that I am puzzled. She wears a little gold cross that Sunday on her pale blue sweater, but the next morning it is gone. The only time I find it thereafter is when I am rummaging in her top drawer for a clean pair of socks to borrow.

  That first week we tiptoe around each other cautious as dynamiters. Her facade breaks off one brittle shard at a time. Two forces free Donna. One is me. I am a force. A power of joy moves through me those early weeks in the realm of my own sweet volition. I have grown a foot overnight. I sit up till two studying. When I finish my classwork, I read hers just to share, to gobble everything. I run to lectures, my face burning with the passion to listen, to consume, to take every course in the fat catalog simultaneously forever. I will learn French and Zoology, Chinese Thought and Physical Anthropology, The Hundred Years War and the World of Cervantes. Intimate rain caresses me. No one scolds me into galoshes. I run bareheaded through streets pelted with bright minnow leaves swimming in the gutters. I stride past the dormitories, lamps blazing from each room as the huge buildings steam against the wind-buffeted lowering sky like ships of light, and no authority minds what I do as long as I am back by curfew. The bars are gone. I have leapt from my cage and no one shall entice me into a narrow room again. My energy makes Donna smile.

  The second force? Her own desperation. I feel it as an electric crackling that builds till it burns across the gap like a voltage experiment in physics, when she cries at me, “Oh, you don’t know! You don’t know me. If you did, you’d walk out of this room.”

  That is a sharp hook. I narrow my eyes at her astride her desk chair like Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, with her corduroy skirt rucked up to show her beautiful legs—Donna’s, not Marlene’s—and I know I am being lured to ask questions. How delightful, that someone should want me to pay attention. By the fourth week I do not think of her as my cousin any longer; I have begun to think of her as my conspirator. We are poor, we are on scholarships, we are ill-dressed, we take the hard courses, we come from the wrong cities and addresses, we will not be rushed by sororities. On the rest of the corridor respectability is counted in the number of cashmere sweater sets and boyfriends with Greek addresses a virtuous girl keeps under or near but not on her bed. You go nine tenths of the way and get pinned. Donna always manages to have dates on the weekends but whatever she is looking for, the Kens and Bobs who have asked her out so far are not it. How am I suddenly aware of caste lines on our corridor? Donna is educating me in her awarenesses, as I in mine. She describes herself as a socialist, since last week.

  Our talk is full of “musts” and “must nots,” as in, “We must learn to act authentically with the opposite sex” (me), to Donna announcing right now, “We must get ourselves decent bras.”

  A decent bra in 1953 is nearer to an armor breastplate than to a silky froth of lingerie. It holds the breasts apart, forward and out as if setting up a couple of moon shots. We do not have such objects but Donna has it in mind that we need them. Buying them is beyond our means. I regularly steal food for us to supplement dormitory rations, but I can’t see how to swipe bras which are kept under the counter downtown and doled out one by one to be tried. I have checked the situation, and in the process, with a resurgence of my old gang skill, swiped two sweaters, a black wool for me with a turtleneck and long sleeves and a navy blue for Donna. I did not think of them as being for either of us in particular, since we both wear the same sizes in everything but bras and shoes, but Donna insisted ownership be established. I will work on her, I think. I lean toward the communal. I would like everything in the room to be both of ours.

  Donna wears her new navy turtleneck, eyeing her neat pale self in the mirror as she flattens the sleek bowl of her moon-colored hair. “Devastating. If only it was cashmere.”

  I learn. Next time I will steal the right kind. I want to please her. Pleasure makes her avid and fierce. Now she is peering with a frown as she repeats, “We must have decent bras.”

  I perch on the ledge by the casement windows open to the gentle rain, feeling a sensual melancholy like a drug cooling my veins. “Mmm,” I say, “I can’t make those stores for a bra, ma Donna.”

  She looks at her watch, graduation present from a former boyfriend. I think she graduated from him too. “Almost midnight. We’ll hit the laundry rooms.”

  “I don’t know.” I turn from the rain to face her. “Hitting a store is one thing.”

  “From those rich bitches? I’d love to hit them for real.”

  It’s expulsion if we’re caught, but that’s beside the point. I appreciate her class hatred that sharpens mine, but I wish she didn’t covet so fiercely what the others have. “‘Things are in the saddle and ride man,’” I quote, but Donna says, “Buggery! You wouldn’t walk all hunched over if you had a decent bra.”

  I set the ground rules: we can only rob girls whose wash reveals their class to be very affluent and only if they have on the line more of what we take. We can only use other houses than our own. (Four houses connect through their basements to each other. The outer doors are all booby-trapped with alarms after ten thirty.) That last rule is for fear somebody may recognize her stuff in our subsequent washes. Down into the bowels of the hill we glide in our bathrobes carrying laundry bags and books, as if to wash and study. Donna takes on a bright tight look, her eyes squinted behind her blue-rimmed glasses, her lips pulled back to show her small good teeth. Where did she get good teeth in our family? When I opened my mouth at the physical examination for freshmen, the dentist yelped with glee and three times every week I have dental appointments for students to practice on my poor child’s rotten and broken molars.

  “Want to see The Wild One tomorrow night?”

  She shakes her head no. “Going out with Bob.”

  “What for?” We check out a laundry meeting all our specs, except for size: 38A. Too bad. “You don’t even like him.”

  “What’s that got to do with it? He’s better than nothing.”

  “I saw you necking with him outside,” I say tentatively.

  “So? I’m not fucking him, if that’s what you think.”

  That she might hadn’t occurred to me. “Why shouldn’t you, if you want to?” I brazen it out, although the idea of her touching anybody she doesn’t even like is ugly to me.

  “You mean that?” She inspects another row of washing. “Name tags sewn in. I can get them out with a razor. This is your size. I thought you’d be involved with some guy yourself by now.”

  “Me? I wouldn’t know how to go about it.” I angle between her and the door, keeping watch.

  “You aren’t a virgin. You! You aren’t!”

  I shrug. “Now, if you could lose your cherry by thinking about it or reading about it or even writing about it…”

  “I never expected it.” She is disappointed in me. “Of course I’m a virgin.”

  She is lying. I am embarrassed. I feel as if I have failed her by lacking experience and failed her if she must lie to me. I say nothing but lead on to the next laundry room.

  Football Saturday in late October, the dormitories, the hills of town are emptied. From the stadium two miles away the rhythmic shouts rise, a great roar going up through the brilliant air and jangling the nerves, suggesting to me who has already sampled the hard cider I carry on my hip a human sacrifice out of The Golden Bough. I also carry my notebook, while Donna totes rye bread, cheese and pears. We head into the Arboretum. Donna was here last night making out with Vincent, her newest. Across a ravine, brick apartments for married students show between salmon-leaved oaks. We sold our football tickets to buy records. I have just discovered Bartok and what one of us bites into, the other chews and swallows.

  “In that black turtleneck and a good bra, you look sexy today,” she tells me.

  I s
hrug. Making me over. Broad leaves webbed brown on gold, scarlet slivers drift over the ruts of the dirt road. “I don’t want to get trapped in that kind of female caring. To be blind with self-centered-ness.”

  “Listen!” She stops short. In the sun her eyes are alcohol flames. “If you aren’t aware with your body, you might as well die. You are self-conscious, but in a bad shy way.”

  “I’m two months old. I was just born and you’re good for me.”

  She lets out her high barking laugh. “Me? I’m the original corrupting influence.”

  Corrosive maybe. We strike against each other chipping off the useless debris of our childhoods. With her tense never quite completed motions she hurries down this road. She has so little color in her skin and hair she should look wan, but her pallor has an edge. “We define each other.”

  “Let’s feed each other. I’m tired of walking.” She points out a path. “There’s the plateau, for couples in a hurry. On fine nights you can’t walk without stepping on them.”

  We leave the road to climb a hill. Above the shrubs the top is treeless, stiff with brown grass that crackles under us. We pass the jug, as I watch small brown ants busy as rush hour around their anthill. Mother from early childhood trained me to see, to listen, to notice. She considered it immoral not to be sharply observant, and used to make me describe what I’d seen in detail to her. Together in secret we would imitate how acquaintances talked. In recent years appalled at my adolescence, my skimpy but undeniably female growth, she retreated to instructions to chop down curiosity, hang back, blind myself. I took refuge in books and fantasies and now Donna is tearing at those paper walls. As I realize I have truly left home, I can remember how close Mother and I once were.

  “You had something to show me,” she murmurs.

  I glance at my notebook in the dead grass. “Not important.”

  “I could kick you, Stu. You want me to listen and I’m willing. Use the moment.”

  I take up the notebook, knowing I delay as much from fear as from modesty. “Called ‘Day is for faces.’” I clear my throat and launch into a fast embarrassed gallop:

  Over the abyss of each self

  the face stretches its drumhead….

  Children with sticky fingers behind old sofas

  whisper false secrets.

  Slaughtered friends are strung up

  like joints of beef in a freezer….

  I have stopped riming. Immediately the lid has blown off. Sweat beads my back as I race through the section where voices cry their confessions: the funeral of our common uncle, stealing, spying. Then:

  In a house of cinders and bottle glass my alleywise friend

  played father to me on her mother’s bed.

  Afterwards I washed my hands and stared in the mirror.

  When I got home, waited for Mother to read me like a palm.

  I knelt. “O God I won’t ever again.”

  Till the next afternoon.

  As I finish the poem, what Donna says, opening her eyes with her hand shadowing them, is, “I’m not a virgin, Stu.”

  I sit up, wondering if I should act surprised. “With Bob or what was his name?”

  “With my own sister’s husband.”

  “Jim?” His grinning freckled face. Him? “But how?”

  She clenches her hands on the clumps of rough grass. Her voice rises muffled. “I came to stay with them in Detroit while she was having her baby. While she was in the hospital, Stu!”

  In my own city these things occurred while I was in the attic reading Freud. Estelle is older but I remember her with blond angel curls, bouncing a blue ball. Perhaps I recall not Estelle in the flesh but Uncle Edward the minister’s home movies in which forever as in the mind of God, Estelle pirouettes, in which Donna red-faced and grubby drags a crippled doll and as she bursts into tears, her panties fall down: all uncles and aunts guffaw. “But how? Did he just ask you, or what?”

  “When we were making their bed.” Quick rough sobs shake her back. “I worship Estelle, I really do!” Her face twists. Brown mascara stains her cheeks like rust as I try to comfort her.

  “Don’t cry!” My hands are catcher’s mitts. What was story is suddenly factual pain. “You didn’t mean to hurt her. She doesn’t know, right?”

  “Isn’t that worse? She loves me, because she doesn’t know.”

  “Then it doesn’t hurt her,” I say leadenly.

  Sitting up she blows her nose. “But it happened again.”

  Capsized. In that moment a blunt weariness wilts my bones. Air of damp baby, baby skin, baby hair. Her anguish has worn through and with keen appetite she prepares fresh revelations. That electric springiness, the pain, the turning, are equally real. “How?” I ask.

  “Last summer, when they were visiting. Mother and Estelle went shopping that day, while Jim and I stayed with baby. Jim came to my room. Afterward, he made me promise I’d never tell Estelle and I’d never let him do it again.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.” A small crooked grin. “We haven’t been alone since. And he’s short-tempered with me. Stu, he blames me.”

  “He has no right. He should never have done it if he was going to make you feel guilty.”

  “He used to tease me. Call me baby doll. But Estelle has always been wonderful. Mother never told me about periods. All she ever said about sex was, ‘Men are beasts.’ When I got acne, it was Estelle who took me right to the doctor to fix it.”

  “Donna, listen.” Gripped by vision I squat. “Sex isn’t dirty. Your brother-in-law is a hypocrite, and you had a bad first experience, that’s all.”

  “It wasn’t so bad. I mean during it. Afterward I felt like a piece of garbage. I even got religious again. I went to confession and I did almost everything Father Ross told me to, for penance. I got bored though. The second time I didn’t bother. I don’t believe in that crap anyhow.”

  “We’ll be the good family for each other. We’ll close ranks and help each other and undo the lies they teach us.”

  Her face has dried to a harsh whiteness, though her lids are swollen. “You don’t think I’m rotten?”

  “No more than me. We have to find a morality that works for us.” Lolling back I touch my notebook and glow with power like a successful shaman. My poem changed the world and I am not alone.

  But she is watching me with a little smile. “I’m glad I wasn’t in your poem along with that Callie girl. I thought I might be.”

  It is as if I fall thirty feet as I sit. “In the poem?”

  “Because of that time—you remember—when we slept upstairs together at Grandpa’s—when I was fourteen and you were thirteen.” She is watching me warily, her eyes large but that little smile not quite under control.

  I know immediately that she is right. I can’t tell her the truth, that I plain forgot. I think she would be insulted. I can’t believe I seduced my own cousin during summer vacation, but at thirteen I didn’t think of it as sex. It was just good old dirty fun. But she knows it’s serious; she learned that too. We’ve both read psychology books. “I don’t think I’m really a lesbian,” I say meekly. I haven’t the faintest idea what I am. An idiot who can forget seducing her cousin, obviously. I’m lucky she didn’t squeal on me to the whole family. I’d be in prison or reform school or the loony bin.

  “Of course not,” she says soothingly. “I don’t think you’re really sick. But you must have some experience with men. It’s lopsided. You started off wrong.”

  “I haven’t done that in years. I had lots of boyfriends, in the gang. I necked with Freddie a lot. And he tried to rape me once.” Some credentials. The truth is I don’t feel particularly feminine as defined by Mother and the girls in the dorm. I don’t feel male either. I must be something else altogether, like a giraffe maybe. Who can tell the sex of that oak tree scattering acorns on the slope below us? The idea of being fertilized by the wind has a certain appeal when I make my way through the crowd of couples slobbering good night in the court
yard of the dormitory every night, as I return from a walk, a movie or the library.

  “You just lack confidence,” she pronounces, biting into a pear once she has inspected it. “If you act attractive, everybody treats you that way.” She eats only fruit that satisfies her exacting standards. I eat the rest. “You eat everything mushy and battered that isn’t squashed flat.”

  “Ah, but I draw the line at mold. We all have our principles.” The blue of the sky is dimming. The air grows heavier and colder.

  “Principles,” she mutters. “I don’t want to keep seeing Vincent. He’s a little fascist. I have to act stupid with him.”

  “I don’t think we should have anything to do with people we have to pretend with.”

  “I hate to stay in weekends.”

  “There are fourteen thousand men on this campus.”

  “What an idea.” Breaking open the cheese, she tosses me a piece. “You know how to cheer me up…. He’ll call tonight. You answer, say I’m out. Be evasive. Imply I’m on a date.”

  “Why not just tell him you don’t want to see him?”

  “That won’t do. No, do it my way, won’t you?”

  “Okay,” I mumble, nervous at the prospect. Giddy with cider we talk, we lie and talk and talk till the sun is a bonfire at the foot of our hill and we are chilly and hungry for even a dorm supper.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHAT WOMEN ARE MADE FOR

  MORNINGS WE LOAD our trays with desiccated eggs, toast, a pat of unidentifiable jelly, bitter coffee. Too sleepy to talk we bolt our food. Julie, who has a single room down the hall and does not eat breakfast, joins us for coffee. Then we hasten together out to the muddy path that runs above the women’s athletic field. Clatter and clank of dishes, women pouring from every door to join the clotted processional downhill and up again. The wind at the brink blows the last wisps of sleep away, leaving us cranky and raw from late studying.