Braided Lives Read online

  I trot wagging my tail to offer my themes to Professor Bishop. Long face running well up into his scarce hair, long liver-spotted hands whose deft red sarcasms dot my papers, he is the dyspeptic angel who guards the gate to my paradise of words. To seduce his wearily malicious surfeit of freshman prose, I tell him tales of my childhood. He assigns a theme on privilege: I write on Father. He assigns a theme on freedom: I write of Mother. “Amusing.” “Astringent.” The circus of my upbringing stands open for your delectation, Mr. Bishop, although my clowns turn somersaults in terror of your scorn, not at all sure why we are funny.

  Slimy grappling in zoology lab. The diagrams in the manual are precise, but my frog holds only eggs. We are handed live frogs to pith their brains. My partner jabs nervously. Blood oozes on the frog’s spotted back as it screams, kicking long and distorted like a saint from El Greco, in my partner’s clumsy fist. Taut with fury I take the frog to drive in the needle, my hand wet with slime and blood. Proud of my successful brutality, I look up to see Donna charging out the door, the lanky lab assistant fluttering behind. “It’s the waste,” she says later. “Killing them and nobody learned a thing. Better to stab those hateful premed students.” She is intransigent even in petty hatred, intense where I am mottled and curious.

  I struggle through the central lobby in the liberal arts building known as the Fishbowl. Hot and disheveled I subside into a front seat in a wedge-shaped auditorium to gaze on my idol, Professor Donaldson. I had intended to take ancient or medieval history, ending up in American only because at registration I heard two students gossiping about what a pinko Donaldson is. His classes are standing room only, full to the legal limit of 440 and beyond with those formally or informally auditing.

  He starts talking almost before he is in the door. He uses his jacket sleeve to erase what he scrawled earlier, occupying space he requires again. Slim, agile, he is over six feet tall but does not seem so because he droops, his head like a prize dahlia the stem cannot hold upright. I suspect he has grown his full auburn beard to look older than his students. Who could have expected the Pilgrim Fathers to have politics or the Revolutionary War to sound like a real revolution in Bolivia? Since last Wednesday he has broken his glasses. They are held at the hinge with tape I find endearing.

  Saturday morning after looking up his address, I drag Donna off to gaze upon what turns out to be a Tudor-style red brick apartment house on North State Street altogether too bland and normal to suit my fantasies. The seventh time around the block, Donna who has never seen Donaldson but is willing to share my infatuation companionably, at last complains. But we are rewarded. He comes out with a woman wearing a trench coat much like his. Chestnut hair in a long single braid. They climb into his blue VW bug and drive off.

  “At least you know he likes women,” Donna says. “Can we go home?”

  “She didn’t look much older than me. She looks like a student.”

  “Twenty-two maybe. Gorgeous boots. Good tweed skirt. Money, I’d say.” Donna has humored me but on the way back she begins to charge interest. “This is ridiculous. You’re comfortable in these crushes. Running across town to spy on him. You could meet him if you wanted to. Just march up to him and preempt his attention.”

  “I couldn’t,” I mumble. “Why should he notice me? He has a thousand students at least.”

  “Wear your new black turtleneck.”

  “A third of his students have tits, Donna. I’m sure he’s seen them before.”

  “You’re defeatist, Stu. You can’t drift along this way, having nice safe crushes on men from a distance of two hundred feet.”

  Why not? I’m not bored. I’m happy. When I explain this, she becomes more annoyed. “You talk about wanting to experience everything, but it’s all rhetoric. You’re scared.”

  The subtext of her argument is that I must prove myself normal, heterosexual. The reason for my resistance is half incompetence—I have not the tiniest notion how to begin—and half satisfaction. I have someone to love: Donna. I just want to read my books and listen to our music and run around town like a puppy set loose, taking in all the free concerts and cheap plays I can gobble and talk and talk and talk to her.

  We do talk. “Defense” is the dirtiest word we know. We condemn racism and militarism and our parents; we make dramas of what we would say to McCarthy. We seek a fluid openness in which to think means to speak and results in being understood—immediately; in which to conceive of an action is to be more than halfway toward doing. We try. Our white room burns. Outside the air feels laxer.

  We share a booth in the sweetshop across from the dorms. Our coats are buttoned to the neck because we are dressed only in skirts. Our blouses and underwear are churning clean in the house laundry room. A foul supper left us hungry. “So why sit and starve?” I demanded. Now with the rough lining of my jacket chafing my nipples tender and a newer dare on the table, I am torn between the excitement of our games and the fear of how fast they escalate.

  “We need a teapot.” She motions toward the metal pot that just served us. “You struck out as a child. I just blundered into trouble. I must learn to act.”

  “But if they catch us tonight?” Our booth is open to the counter where the scrawny proprietor leans. Donna has toward her slim body a cool functional pride I can admire but not imitate.

  “That’s a weak shitless reason.” She empties the pot into her cup and crams it into her open purse. As she rises and heads for the cashier, I stuff the ashtray, butts and straw ends and all in my pocket, and hurry after. Damp with sweat my fingers fumble the coins.

  In the wet street we grin at each other. “What a nice teapot, my dear,” I lilt. “Has it been long in your family?” I turn out my pocket and shake the mass of butts and ashes into a puddle as she hops on a low wall and balancing struts past me. It electrifies me how what I say to her does not return to me thoroughly chewed as with Howie but leaps into action.

  The snow swirls in the courtyard, large cotton candy flakes Julie plays at trying to catch at our open casement window. On the ledge where I so often curl or sprawl, she is sitting, one leg in plaid wool slacks drawn up, one with the booted foot flat on the floor. “You think we could have missed them?” she asks in her deep cooing voice.

  “She’d be up here by now.”

  Julie’s short fawn-colored hair was done yesterday in stiff loopy curls and she keeps fingering it shyly but obsessively. “Perhaps he’s taking her to supper.”

  “He’s got no money. Besides, she said she’d come back.” Last night Donna went out with an art student. Now we wait for our first look at this Lennie. “He’s ugly in an attractive way,” Donna told me. “He’s subversive-looking. He grew up in a slum and he’s brilliant!” Sophomore from Brooklyn, he’s here like us on scholarship. I wonder if his being Jewish shows my influence.

  “I don’t know why we’re making such a to-do about it,” Julie murmurs sourly. “She finds a new one every three weeks.” Julie comes from Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy suburb of Detroit I had never heard of until I came to college and discovered that was one of the few areas around Detroit you were allowed to be from. Julie’s parents bought her culture along with horseback riding and skiing lessons, but she took to books and music too seriously to please them. She finds us vulgar but intelligent. I find her a lonely snob with vulnerable patches. She is tall and pear-shaped, blushes easily and hates herself for it. Now a cry bursts from her, her charm bracelet jangling. “Come here!”

  I jump up, grazing my head on the upper bunk. Donna in her blue coat is walking twined around a boy just a little taller. Curly red hair thick as a fox brush and a luxuriant red beard halo his face in tangles. Jostling at the casement we wave madly. “Hey, Donna!” echoes through the court till she looks up grinning and waves and Lennie turns where she is pointing and waves too, his beard jogging as he calls out something.

  Julie brings her hand to her mouth, palm out. “It’s too much,” she giggles. “He looks like a madman! Van Gogh crossed wi
th a rabbi!” She laughs till her eyes are wet.

  “Julie, so help me if you don’t stop giggling I’ll push you in the closet! Admire him for her!”

  She shakes my hand off, subsiding. “You want me to tell her he’s handsome?”

  “Say … he looks interesting.”

  Donna rushes in, flinging her coat at her desk chair. “People! What a wonderful afternoon!” Her fine hair clings to her scrubbed-looking cheeks. Her eyes squint up to blue slits of joy.

  “What did you do?” I ask.

  “We walked. Up- and downhill, walking in the beautiful clean sweet snow. Making tracks.” She kicks off her shoes soaked dark. “What do you think of him? Isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t he wild-looking?”

  “He looks interesting,” Julies says primly, glancing at me.

  “I’d love to meet him,” I say. “Did he kiss you?”

  “Hundreds of times. All up and down every hill.” Her laugh barks, high and lively with delight. “His beard is soft, like cat’s fur!”

  Julie checks her slender gold watch. “Well, I must be off to Le Cercle Français…. Shall I see you at supper?”

  As soon as the door closes behind her, Donna throws her arms around me in a violent shy hug, drawing back before I can respond and hopping past her chair. “He’s marvelous, Stu. He knows everything! He’s like you—quick and a little dogmatic and all warm and soft inside.”

  “You like him, Donna? This one you really like?”

  “I love him.”

  “I’m glad. See, things are working out better already. This is the sort of man you want—somebody you can talk to.” I pace the room, flapping my arms with excitement and truly I am not jealous. My love for her is at once humble, white hot and nonpossessive. I want the world for both of us. I want her to sail out on daily adventures of learning and doing and feeling and sail back into harbor with me at night to share and discuss.

  She is staring in the mirror, bleak, cynical. “What am I doing with someone so wonderful? I’ll just fuck up. Fat chance I could do anything right. I don’t deserve him.”

  Tonight, Saturday night, I have a date with one Carl Forbes from my Spanish class. Donna supervises my dressing. “What does he look like, this Carl? Tall and blond?”

  “Not bad at all.” I do not know, because I had not paid attention and after he asked me out, I was too shy to stare.

  The buzzer sounds. I gasp, reaching for my purse before I realize what Donna says, “Two buzzes. That’s Lennie. I was afraid he wouldn’t get here in time.”

  I put my purse down with a thump. “In time for what?”

  Smoothing her fine hair, she wrinkles her nose at me. “We want to see this gent. Give him our committee approval.”

  “No, Donna!” The door bangs behind her and I slump on the lower bunk, afraid to budge for fear I will muss myself. Still I am proud. I did this on my own. When the buzzer sounds for me and I trot down to the lobby, Lennie gives me a broad lewd wink as I cross to the sign-out desk. There Carl looms in a tweed overcoat, chesty and flat-footed with a ruddy, broadly handsome face. He takes my arm and we are off across campus to the movie.

  “Well, how are you doing in old Spanish?”

  “It’s killing me,” I say politely. I have been trying to read Neruda’s Canto General on my own.

  “Say that again! Where’re you from?”

  “Detroit. How about you?”

  “Chagrin Falls. That’s outside Cleveland.”

  This is not so hard. I begin to unwind. I can actually swallow and breathe. We are scarcely seated in the dark before the colored screen where the colors flash a Cinemascope epic of the Bible in living muscle power (I forgot to ask him what we were seeing), when his arm comes around my shoulders. A moment later he is whispering in my ear.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “Nothing, honey.” Still the lips move at my ear. When I feel his tongue I am surprised, then worried if my ear is clean. Pressed and pawed and nuzzled, I sit uncomfortably quiescent. His face looks strange and bloated close up. A belly dancer is performing with snakes. The king gossips in the ear of a wicked-looking bozo with a scimitar. I wish Carl would move away, but I do not want to offend him. Embarrassed into sticky rigidity, I watch slaves toil dragging boulders until his hand closes tight and hot over my right breast. I push his hand away. He moves it back. I move it off and sit up, leaning away. The hand withdraws to my shoulder. I breathe again. In five minutes the hand has edged down. I tuck it between me and the seat to trap it there.

  Carl murmurs, “Don’t you like that?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “Don’t you want to get acquainted?”

  “Shhh!” from behind us. Moses is delivering the Gettysburg Address while Rome burns and the walls come tumbling down. If I close my eyes I cannot even see Carl’s face. When the hand pounces again, I twist the fingers hard. I expect him to jump up in anger: let him go! But he only begins nudging and nuzzling again. I must have hurt him but he gives no sign. His attack feels half hostile. I cannot believe he likes the little he knows of me.

  As we leave, God’s last stentorian commands echoing in our ears, he says, “I know about a party. What do you say, honey?”

  I want to go home, but if he is not angry, perhaps I should not be. This initial attack may be customary. I hate to go home to Donna a complete failure. We trudge past the shops of campus town at a quick march. We cut through campus and slog on half a mile out Washtenaw. I have no small talk to offer him while he hastens. I hear the party as we approach a big white house set well back from the street.

  The living room is jammed. I would not step into this hot noisy moil of strangers if he had not got hold of my arm again. Girls sit on boys’ laps and everyone sits on the floor. A record player offers white dance music loudly. The Four Sophomores. Dreary and the Dreamers. Stanley and the Softheads. I like to dance: I learned in grade school and that was one thing I loved to do with Freddie. We used to do both Detroit- and Chicago-style jitterbug until we dropped. Detroit is tighter; Chicago is stompier. But no one here dances. There would hardly be room.

  The girls look like those in the dorm, well dressed, matching, neat as they talk in tight groups or lean glued to their escorts. Under the light fixture hung with balloons, a beer keg makes a puddle on the floor. Focusing on one of the banners I realize this is a fraternity house. I am disappointed. I expected luxury, but the furniture is old and battered.

  From a private source Carl gets two paper cups of gin, shouting a few hellos as he bucks our way through to a back room. Only a night-light thins the smoky gloom in a room just as crowded. No one looks up. I hear a few wet kisses, soft moaning, laughter. How strange that people go to a party to neck. Stumbling over legs and bottles, we sit in the only vacant corner, half under a desk.

  “No!” I say. He gets more gin and tries again. I drink speedily what he hands me, so he won’t see my grimaces. What am I doing in this hothouse, with this monster of persistence? Why does he imagine I will change my mind? I ask him.

  “What do you think you’ll do when you get married? Argue all night?”

  “I’m not going to get married.”

  “Go on, every girl wants to get married.”

  “Bullshit. At any rate, this isn’t marriage.”

  “How will you get to know fellows, if you act cold?”

  Does he want to make me right on this floor? “I’m not cold. You’re nuts.” He is a dim looming shape. I begin to laugh weakly, helplessly.

  He produces more gin. “What are you, a freshman?” When I nod, he says, “You’ll change your tune. I’d like to meet you in a couple of years. Women are made for love.” He gets up for more gin. As the moments pass and pass in a groggy haze I realize he has abandoned me. I stumble to the bed and drag my coat from under a dozing boy.

  I dodge through the living room, a blaze of impinging faces, popping balloons of talk. The door opens and shuts. The change is electric. The street is frozen, still. My f
eet are disconnected. Here I am hiding like a monkey in the tree behind my eyes and I’ve lost control of my feet but they trot along down there like friendly dogs, keeping me company. I begin to run, sliding on ice, leaping around corners to sink knee-deep in banks of snow with a crackling as I break through the icy crust. I jump to spank my hand against a No Parking sign. Coming down, my heel skids and I plump on my back. I can hardly rise for laughing. I cross campus galloping, bursting through a hedge to skim across a parking lot. The sharp cold bites my skin as I scoop up the snow, packing it to send wild blooping arcs at the cars grinning at me.

  “Hey! Stop that, you!” A university watchman runs at me.

  See him waddling. I pack a snowball and it sails out keen and true, exploding on his neck. In surprise I stare till he is almost on me, then break and run, bounding through the far hedge. His heavy footsteps thud behind me but by the time I run up dormitory hill I have outdistanced him. It is easy to drop behind a thicket of bare lilacs along the cemetery wall across from the oldest dormitory. The lights on the dormitories blink twice, blink once and go out, signaling curfew. I smile, listening cunningly for the watchman’s steps. Finally I get up, brush the snow off and trot to my dorm. The doors are locked and I must pound for the assistant to let me in.

  “Well. You’re late.” The woman looks me over. “What happened to you?”

  “I fell. Twisted my ankle.” I limp cleverly to the desk and sign in, then limp to the elevator. Up we sail so nice. The doors open. I step dazed into a crowd. The hall is lined with girls in robes and pajamas setting their hair in pin curls, filing their nails. Waiting for me? Trial by jury. Escape!

  “You’re late for the corridor meeting again, Stuart,” the trim grim blond standing in midhall raps out. “If it’s not one of you, it’s the other.”

  With a show of dignity I brush the particles, dead leaves, twigs from my coat. “Ladies, the democratic process means a lot to me!” I am getting my wind. “The trouble with this place is—”

  Julie tugs hard and I sit with a thud between her and Donna. My hands are grimy and cut with a slow ooze of blood from my palm. Through the long winter of the meeting I stare at the baseboard. Dulcie, the athletic chairman, is urging us to play soccer or field hockey. I raise my hand when others do. I sign a paper and pass it. My head aches.