On Keeping Women Read online

  “Anything I can do to help?” she says.

  That’s kind of her. But I wonder why she thinks any woman with pajamas stuffed in galoshes, and a man’s lumberjack covering her dropseat, has advice I can use.

  “The city disturbs me.” I know that in the end I’ll tell her how. But nothing ever got past her language—certainly not her emotions. And that would be that, I thought.

  I was wrong.

  “Dad told me what you said.” She sighs. “He’s so vulnerable.”

  “He is.” I flip back my hair. “Huh.”

  That interested her. She studied gesture. “You mean you are? And you’re denying that quality in him?”

  I flip my hair forward, wetting my nose. “Maybe. I meant—you’re the masochist.”

  “Those puddings!” she says at once. “You’re right. Nobody needs dessert.”

  I put my arms up, and shriek a little.

  The cop on the beat passes, eyeing us. Yeah, he knows us; he’s the one referred James to the morgue. “Now, girls—” he says, shaking his head. “Now girls.” He didn’t like fights.

  “See—you stopped the rain,” Mother says to me, soothing. And giving him the high sign to leave us be. “But you got it twisted about me, lady … I’m a worker. Who happens to be a parasite.” She stashed her hands on her hips. “Why else do you suppose I’m a radical?”

  Lying here in the weeds—there are stars up there now—it’s my firm conviction that life teaches everybody to be humorous about at least one thing. If so, it came to her and me late.

  “You suppose I could ask Officer Maraglia?” I say. “How to be a prostitute? A streetwalker, I mean.” What joy—to walk these streets.

  She looks over to where he’s disappearing, before she answers me. “Or a callgirl, maybe? Your arches are weak.”

  But then she feels my forehead, my cheeks. Draws me to her by the wrists, kisses one of them. And sits down so hard on a wooden piling that I fall into her lap. I can’t stay there. She can’t stay on the piling. We both stand up.

  “Wait a minute—” I say. One side of her dropseat’s been snagged open by the piling. I button her up again. “You suppose they have little dropseats, sort of out front? Or is that a vulgar thought?”

  She stares at the harbor. “I warned Charlie. That you were already over-prepared.”

  James comes up just then. I know he’s fond of me, though he’ll never let on. Still won’t. “Schizophrenia?” he says. “Often starts at fifteen.”

  “Seventeen,” Mother says, turning on me. “And lay off her. I’m the caseworker here.”

  My father comes down the pier, scratching. He’s wearing my mother’s green Loden cape. “Beautiful night, isn’t it. I couldn’t sleep either.” He moons at the river as if he’s forgotten he’ll be crossing it again, come daylight. But he’s heard her. “Come on, Renata, give it a rest. Give Lexie here.”

  As if it isn’t him who always harangues.

  James and I sideswipe glances again. We’re decently dressed, for us. For the hour, even formally. With parents like ours, we do what we can to restore the balance. Not that it works.

  I address them all. “Mother has her clients. And you have the plant. Plants.” (I couldn’t pluralize those now; he was vulnerable.) “And you both have James and me.” (I wouldn’t call that an advantage now, either. But for my short hour, I was relentless.) “And James has the morgue. What have I got?” I see Father open the mouth I’m already afraid is mine too. “And if you ever call me Girlbud again, I’ll positively leave.”

  “She wants a vocation, Charlie,” Mother says. “But she doesn’t know what.”

  I gnaw my lip, betrayed. And betray back, quick as I can. “I do so know. I’m not him.”

  James’s eyes widen. “Do you, Sis. You never said.”

  I couldn’t. There are technical words for sense-confusion; I know that now. And many avenues to it. Music that confuses us with pictures, of a kind the composer never planned. Odors with a little hush to them. Gin that makes Bach smell like flowers. My son, at six, said “Wednesday is pink.”

  “The city—” I wanted to say to them. “That you have burdened me with. No—trusted me with, too soon. Like jewels I’m to inherit but haven’t yet. I want the city, between my thighs.”

  “Want to study medicine too?” Mother says. “Maybe we could stake you.” Her tone’s as false as her puddings. “When it comes time.”

  “Sibling jealousy?” Father shakes his head, doubting; he’s the one who spends time with us. “No—I don’t think.”

  How smart they think they are, James signals me. About each other. And never see themselves. Or us.

  “No, I don’t want,” I say violently. “I hate horses.”

  Mother trembles. She feels professionally close to madness in others, but doesn’t want it in the family. “Overstimulated, see? And two years away from college yet. We’ll have to organize.”

  The policeman drifts over. Maybe he’s never been sure of us completely. A family who’ll stand on a pier at four in the morning, discussing its business … Outré, yes? And no doubt responsible for the way I can lie up here now, at almost the same hour, calmly discussing my life—with my life…

  “Organize?” the cop says, addressing James as the most decently clothed. “Who’s organizing what?”

  “We are,” James says, pointing. “Her.”

  So that’s how, as soon as school is out that summer and next, I go to study to be a medical secretary. And never get to college at all. As Mother says, “James’ll be bringing plenty of interns home.”

  As Father says the day I marry one, “You women never look farther than your nose.”

  This is in reference to the foreign tour he’d briefly spirited me away on to persuade me otherwise, the minute I’d announced my intentions. He’d aimed for Canada, but the hired car had failed us—and perhaps the money too. “Will you just look at the world!” he’d said to me from a window of the Hotel Oswego in Cooperstown, New York. “Look. Look!”

  Let them fade now as parents do, into the ruins but still alive. Mother at sixty still repairing the city volunteer—all the way from the Gulf. Father leaving the city altogether—like people who so love cats, but desert them—to follow his nose into retirement with a richer wife—her nightgowns being especially luxe.

  James’s imagination, bachelor again after two tries, has proved most durable. Often after he’s been up the river for the weekend with us, and is off for the city again, he’ll whisper something to me, while brother-in-law Raymond kindly goes to extricate James’s car from those others which on Sunday afternoons are often pulled up on the various front lawns of the houses along the road here, like lines of shoats. James’s sibling eye is meanwhile casting a small judgment on me—a large woman—like those tiny, flat metal stampings of the Statue of Liberty the class used to be sent home with, after toiling up her inner staircase to look out at her spikes. His wicked diagnosis tickles my ear. “Honorable sister,” his voice says. “Float down the river to me any day suits you. Only, not as a corpse.” A city judgment.

  So here I am—as organized.

  When I married Raymond, the tallest, palest (with effort) and most careful of the interns James brought home, the “Dr.” had just been attached to him: two perfect initials which swing from him, and sound as he walks. And are never lost. Later on I gave him a matched tiepin and cufflinks of those same initials, which he wears proudly still. Doctors love simple jokes, the grim dears, and in return for the life they lead, a wife whose jokes are not the same may still cooperate. Sometimes when I lay with him, looking deeply into his chest hairs, a few of these would whorl themselves into those same initials, pair upon pair. And until the finalities that brought me here, there was a pattern of moles on his windpipe that my mind’s eye was working on.

  A blameless man; try as I may, no blame will ever attach to him. Or to his parents. The basement of their house as I first saw it remains the most finished basement in America. Wit
h outlines drawn on the floor—garden-shears to roto-cutters, to ladders and floor-sanders—in which all implements are placed. The ladders being aluminum without the added “i”; theirs is a household local to the very end. Which end may be those milkcans Ray’s mother paints black with bald eagles on them—which no longer hold milk. Around the cellar walls, trunks from another generation stand rigid with non-travel. “A hysterical basement,” I report to James, after the engagement visit. “Someday those empty trunks will explode.”

  And I add how “Since I’ll have to pick up my education piecemeal from now on,” I’ve already learned from my father-in-law-to-be that a veterinarian is a man who doesn’t kick dogs but doesn’t pat them either. Or allow them into the house.

  Ray and I’ve already chosen the shabby Victorian mansion from which he will practice. And in which I will live—needless to say—so I don’t.

  A lie. (What needed more to be said?) An inversion of the past by the future—which is at least me, lying on the river-bank, chilly but not dead, on grass that gets plushier as my thoughts grow clearer—in front of that same house.

  Not angry, really. As my mother used to say in her lingo: “Concerned.” Taken me such a long time to realize I’ve no lingo of my own. But being in the nude here helps. And there are still some hours to dawn. When I must decide. Whether I’ll stay here, and wait to be found, with all my buttons not just buttoned, but off. Or whether I’ll get up just in time, and sneak back into the house.

  That report to James was the first of many over the years, and in his fraternal eyes I’m accustomed to seeing his verdict, long since fixed. For no matter what’s going on in the newspapers or on the battlefields of civilization, while I mouse from stove to village, from planned-parenthood to puddings bidden straight from the natural egg—the word “hysterical” is what’s now firmly applied to me. Even by myself.

  When did I first look around the hillocky streets of this white river-village to find the trees grimacing against the houses they shelter, the river running away to ask the city: “Su-boo-burbia, is that what her hystery-sterical is”?

  The answer’s no.

  That wasn’t lingo, that was prayer.

  Why’s he have to take you thirty miles upriver?” Father said, just before the wedding.

  After the ceremony, he said “People don’t grow, in places like that. It all goes into the chlorophyll.”

  After that, he washed his hands of me. It was at the wedding that he met the lady with the nightgowns.

  “Ray isn’t planning to grow, Father; he’s planning to settle.” Funny how I knew that, even then. And what was one lost erogenous zone?—at twenty I had them to spare. And had a strong interest in nightwear myself at the moment. Pink satin pajamas, the bridal night, and nile-green, panels blowing, the second day; then the honeymoon ascended by stages to a purple velvet hostess-gown; after the first Sunday, I planned a repeat. So, by easy cycles, to the door of the maternity ward. Four times.

  Where we stand before God with a clutch of rubber nipples, or real ones, and we can never go back. Nor would I, if one could. Even if in my small way, I intend to change the imagery of the world to conform with what happens there.

  In my small way, it’s not popular liberty I’m lying here for. Got that back in grade-school, like some of the blacks. Board of Education gave it to thirty thousand of the best pupils in the city—a little enamel flag that James could grow up to wear in his lapel or on his hatband, but which it was understood I could never fly from my grave—and that’s sibling jealousy … After which we were all back in private circumstances again, including the blacks.

  So, lying on my riverbank, what do I want from the parliaments of the world? Membership? Sure, that’s okay. But come on, what good is it to me, or will it be, in my private practice, which is nothing like Ray’s? What profiteth it a woman even if she gain half the token world by genito-urinary contract? What she needs most, is to find her own lingo—and have them publish the Congressional Record in it. At least half of the time. (With automatic translation-boxes on the backs of all theatre-seats, park benches and public conveniences. Including the men’s room at Ray’s club, which they let the wives use once-a-month on Wednesdays—perhaps just above that little cigar-rest which is screwed to each lav door.)

  And alongside the mirrors of all medicine-cabinets in private domiciles.

  Meanwhile the world is thrashing toward dawn without much help from me—and what shall I be saying to whoever leans over this patch of ground which is not even our property—“I am your representative from the Nude?”

  Since it appears that even to pee, I am not going inside to do it, and perhaps not ever—except to telephone James “I’m sailing southward. Meet me at 4 A.M., at the Morton Street Pier.” Friends welcome.

  Let us organize me. It’s been done before.

  Dear Ray:

  For you are dear to me, as the customs allow.

  You do not kick humans—and have been known to pat them.

  I am a woman not entirely zoneless.

  And the children have been consecutive. Four times.

  Forgive me if I recall their births better than their conceptions. I know I was trained not to.

  “You’ll forget it in a day,” the gynecologist says, with a fifty-dollar smile. “Your abdominal muscles are first-class.”

  Nothing to it, he said.

  “But it’s my zone,” I say. “I can’t be expected to give up all of them.”

  He laughs, without charging me more for it. “You won’t want to stay there long.”

  So I shut my mouth. His office is in New York, and the women in our village cherish any good excuse for going there. I’m looking forward to nine months of it.

  Since it’s to be a natural birth, you Ray, the father, are allowed in. I invite James too, as a brother and medical man, but he refuses. On the grounds that he’s a doctor of the public health only. I’m disappointed, but of course that is his field.

  “The private is not my sphere, Lexie,” he says on the telephone. “Thanks a lot.”

  You’re there in a peculiar capacity, Ray, for you. A doctor, with his hands tied. As a father, they’re even afraid you might faint. “Some do,” Dr. Gyno says, with his cutrate grin. The nurse agrees with him.

  So then I ride in, Joan of Arc for a day. Into the stirrups for you, Girlbud—then into the burning bath. At the height, the flames are considerable. But I too have my hands tied. “She’s one of those who won’t scream,” I hear the nurse say scornfully. I thought I had; later she swore not. But perhaps that’s how they’re trained too.

  … I remember you though, Ray, leaning over me like a spindle of damp wood which isn’t afraid it’ll ignite. The lower half of my body is almost totally consumed. I am on the point—the absolute point, of learning my lingo. And then I lost it…

  “Scream for me, Lexie,” you said.

  So I deliver silently.

  A minute after, I’m watching all your antics like at a spectator-sport at which the tables have been suddenly turned.

  “Breathe, you little bastard,” the doctor says, slapping. And inaccurate to the last.

  Above your mask, you’re weeping. “A boy, Alexandra. But we’ll name him ‘Alex,’ you bet.” On the spot, you’re always generous.

  “How are you, Mother?” the nurse said.

  All my insides feel pearly now—the placenta, perhaps. I feel all nacre, the way I do when a man leaves me—mother-of-pearl. But it’s blood, I bet. If I choose to look down. I see they don’t want me to. Yes, it’s blood. My mouth falls open. Though never so wide as the opening down there. I see they want me to close up shop as quickly as decent. Nurse mops. I’m a little heady with what I’ve done down below. Why, I’ve given birth to all of you—is what I’m thinking. All of you. In my time. Why can’t I speak of it?

  The baby does it for me.

  “Wah!”—it says “—I’m the only normal one here.”

  You know how children are.

>   “Everyone speaks for me,” I said.

  I apologize to all of you, for remembering anyway. Such an unnatural act.

  James reported that his friend Dr. Gyno thought I took things too hard. “‘Very poetical girl, is she, your sister?’” he said.

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘No. Over qualified.’”

  But he never will tell me for what.

  So the next time I go to Maternity, I scream like everybody else. And have many more visitors afterward. From our village road especially. People are shy, I begin to notice. Too shy to say how living really is—even the loud ones. Mutual screaming helps.

  But then I stop going to hospital. “Four times, we agreed upon, Ray—remember? And of course you do. Words which are said—signed, sealed and delivered—are the way you remember your acts.” (Between phonecalls which take you gratefully away from them.) Your word is your bond. “Yes,” you say thoughtfully. “Perhaps we should rest from our labors for awhile. Having them so close—I warned you. But you were always—”

  “Yes,” I say. “Hysterical.”

  So after that, we make love for ourselves entirely. I agree with the Catholics; that’s dangerous. That way, you can better scrutinize the sex, and the partner.

  So after a while we have rested entirely. Dear Ray.

  In a Fiery Glade

  “ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” James says, maybe twelve years later.

  Mud in my eye from a bad throw of Charlie my eldest, I scrape cookie-grease off a cushion, feed it to the dog, shunt her off the sofa and sit down haunchily in her warmth. It’s Friday, the Saint’s Day of the week, domestically. And in June, when the last Parents’ Day of the crayola crowd has just snaked its way three times round the school in tributary drawings, and on out into the blue. Soon will be summer, sand on the soles and the heart starred with weenie-roasts. When the first child first plays the piano, one cries. Two others, banished to the tower, breathe together on the Mellophone—which is a trainer for the French horn. In the dark of the landing, I breathe in unison. On hope, my instrument. These days I tremble with selflessness. That candy delight. Stuffed well in, it keeps the language down.