Boy, Snow, Bird (6 page)

Then there was the usherette job—that one lasted three weeks and a day.

When the ax came, it was because I watched the movies too much. I’d already been given three warnings, two of them in writing. Then, half an hour after I’d received the third warning, the manager himself caught me sitting down and watching a movie like a regular audience member. To be honest I wasn’t even really watching the movie. It was one of those ones they call screwball comedies, where people mislead and ill-treat each other in the most shocking and baffling ways possible, then forgive and forget about it because they happen to like the look of each other. Only they call it falling in love. Those movies are the equivalent of supernatural thrillers for me—if I watched them too closely, I’d shriek uncontrollably. So mainly I was just sitting.

The manager stood over me and asked me to explain myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to speak; it just seemed smarter not to. All of a sudden it felt as if I had far too many teeth, more teeth than it was decent to show.

“In that case I’m afraid we’ve come to the end of the road, Miss Novak,” the manager said.

I was a little sad on my last day.

I wasn’t going to miss being an usherette—the uniform itched, and identifying couples who were sitting too close together and assaulting them with a blast of light lost its charm surprisingly quickly. But I’d miss the cool, fresh, all-day darkness of the
screening theaters, and the way light played across the screen with a staggering indifference. The men and women up there would speak, and laugh, and sing, and cry, walk away, stand still, and as long as the reel ran, all this would go on whether the audience was there or not, whether they watched or not.

I left the cinema with a tailor who took me to dinner, then stopped me in the midst of some bushes in the park and pushed his tongue into my mouth. The weak wriggling made me so extravagantly sad that I gagged. He looked stricken, and I was sorry. I took an “Are you frigid?” quiz in a magazine once and got the highest score.
You are: Winter in Siberia
.
Few survive you, and those who do are . . . changed!
I mentioned this to my date, just to let him know he was dealing with a frigid woman. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear; he left me at the front door of the boarding house and walked around the corner at a pretty fast pace. I’ll bet he started running as soon as he was sure he was out of sight.

The following day Mia came over to the boarding house to celebrate the six-month anniversary of my escape from the rat catcher. Following an ancient Cabrini recipe, she filled a stew pot with cold champagne, stuffed in as many handfuls of chopped fruit as it would hold, and served it up. We clinked bowls at the dining room table, which was otherwise empty because it was eleven in the morning, and Mia said: “This, my friend, is champagne soup. Make a wish.”

And I did.

It was standard-issue stuff. I wanted a family. But it was just as Arturo said—I didn’t know how to start anything from scratch, and I didn’t want to know. Getting pushed around as a kid had
made me realistic about my capabilities. I know some people learn how to take more knocks and keep going. Not me. I’m the other kind. That’s what stopped me from telling Charlie Vacic I’d marry him. See, I’m looking for a role with lines I can say convincingly, something practical. And I know Charlie, or at least I know that he’s some kind of idealist. Charlie’s woman probably wouldn’t be able to complain that he didn’t love her enough. She’d be getting his all. Not worship or anything weird, just a certain way he looks at her, something in his voice when he speaks to her, he’d let her know that he’s ready to be asked anything, ready to ask anything. No games, no rules, no about-turns, no limits, by my side when rainstorms sound like serenades, by my side for flat hours of word tennis, each of us guarded, exchanging little comments that are so wretchedly banal that all we want to do is turn away from each other and throw up every single one of our internal organs. It’d be a love like the Siege Perilous. Nice work if you have the constitution for it, but otherwise the harshest of all tests, eliminating everyone who attempts it until the purest of heart happens along. And okay, it’s just about conceivable that you could have a heart that pure and never suspect it until the crucial moment. Maybe I’d give it a shot if the conditions were the same as in the story: You sit in the chair and you die faster than your feet can touch the floor, and that’s how you find out you’re not the one. But in real life the finding out can really drag on, can’t it? Mrs. Boy Vacic was a nightmare of mine. She hit her forties hard and fell to pieces. She had a gushing, anxious laugh that took a while to trickle to a stop (
krrr krrr
) and made her children ask her if she was okay. She babied
herself, rewarding her own good deeds with candy and spoonfuls of grape jelly. That woman—the me that had married Charlie—had tried and failed to find a gap in all of this that was so ordinary, to take some instrument to the gap and shape it, widen it until it got big enough to slip through. She’d wanted to make a beautiful thing, like the Flax Hill natives did. But not a lantern or a bookcase, a life. Not to have what it takes, and to be surrounded by witnesses too. The man you tried with. The children. A boy version of you, or a girl version of him, or both, looking at you with clear, pitiless eyes. These are thoughts that come to you while you spend however long you spend holding icepacks to your eye, or tilting your head back against the wall to try to do something about the way your nose is bleeding, letting your mind work on the question: What reasons might somebody have for leaving her kid in the care of a man like Frank Novak?
Don’t ever try to find her. Don’t even try to find out if she’s alive.
This way my mother’s alive, she’s dead, she’s whatever she deserves to be on that particular day.

I was new to champagne, but as soon as I tasted it, spark after golden spark, I thought, well, there’s magic in this water, no wonder Mia said to wish on it.

“So when are you due to blow the secret world of blondes wide open? I keep walking into stores and waiting for some official-looking person to take me aside and inform me I’m not welcome in their establishment. It hasn’t happened yet, but I can’t go on like this.”

Mia refilled our bowls. “You can’t go on like this? I can’t go on like this. This piece has me petrified. It’s my first big piece after
a year and a half on the ‘cat stuck up a tree’ beat. My dad’s giving this journalism thing another three months to take off before he sends me to Chicago to run another one of his damn hotels. I keep telling him and telling him that I need more time, that it’s not so easy for women in this field, but he just says: ‘Don’t give me that! You’re a Cabrini! And this is 1953! Stop making excuses!’ And I say to him, ‘Yeah, it’s 1953 and down South there’s still a nice little system going, it’s called segregation.’ And
he
says, ‘How about just showing a little gratitude that you’re not colored?’”

“
One
of his hotels?” I said. “How many does he own?”

She shook her head. “Excuse me, but that’s not the point. The point is I’ve been assigned a piece of froth—oh, look, it’s a catty article about blondes written by a brunette—and I want to use it to pull the rug out from under their feet. But the more I write up my notes, the more it all just looks like a pack of playing cards.”

“Well—show me what you’ve got.”

She pulled a couple of typed pages out of her pocket. They had been folded into quarters. I opened them out and read.

You want the scoop, and I’m going to give it to you. But let’s make a deal first. How often have you read an article all the way through to the end and said to yourself: “I don’t know where this chump gets the nerve to show up for work in the morning!” I’ll tell you how I get the nerve, and if you don’t buy it, you don’t have to read another word of it.

Here goes: I’m a brunette from a long line of brunettes. We’ve never really had anything to worry about. After all, gentlemen marry us. But something happened to me when I was ten years old. My hands began to draw distinctions between the sacred and the profane. I watched them and made notes. My left hand was part of me, it belonged to me, and it only consented to touch things I considered beautiful. If Peter Pan had visited me, I’d have given him a thimble with my left hand. I wrote letters to my best friend with my left hand. When I was reading a book and found that a line or paragraph moved me in some way, I’d touch the words with my left hand.

My right hand was an object, it belonged to the world, and I used it to manipulate other objects. Putting my clothes on, pulling my socks up, holding on to the standing pole in the bus, and so on.

I looked up from the page and said: “Mia, this is wacky.”

“Oh, absolutely. But that’s what happened.” She had a little pot of nail varnish out on the tabletop and was painting the fingernails of her right hand blue. “I support you if you want to quit already.”

“No, I’m in—I’m in.”

It was around that time that my parents got divorced. My clothes and books and posters were divided up. Some were put into a room in my dad’s new apartment and the rest stayed at home (which suddenly became new too, without him). My dad said: “Don’t cry. Aw, what are you crying for? What’s happening right now isn’t a bad thing. It isn’t good, either—it’s normal. Okay?”

My mom said: “Yeah, listen to your dad.”

That summer we had a heat wave that killed a lot of people. “More than a thousand?” I asked my dad. He said yeah. “More than TWO thousand?” He said yeah. I was chicken, so I stopped there. That summer Jesse Owens was in all the papers with that gold medal he won representing our country in the Olympics. That was the year the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteered to do the right thing by Spain and help fight Franco. And all the while there was the theater of my hands. It was theater, in that it was the performance of something that was true, and as such, I believed in it with all my heart but was also able to come to the end of it at a moment’s notice. The whole thing was set up as a transaction: My hands were giving me a show. There was my left hand, dangling limp for most of the day—my parents took turns asking if it hurt—and there was my right hand, weary from gripping and pushing and pulling and lifting for two. When I asked my hands to end the show, they wanted payment. My right hand made me promise to “see far” and my left hand made me promise to “remember what is said.”

I gave them my word. And I’ve kept it, partly from a fear of a repeated mutiny. Add a third action: “Write it all down,” and it seems to me you’ve got yourself a journalist of some kind.

All right, if you’re still with me, thanks for staying. I write these words with a fifteen-dollar wig on my head. Wheat-sheaf blond, that’s what it said on the tag. So this is a bulletin direct from the secret world. The first thing you learn is whom to beware of. They’re exactly the same people you had to beware of as a nonblonde. The kind who think they know what you are and don’t mind telling you all about it.

I turned the page over, but there wasn’t any more. Mia blew on her nails. “I guess I could start a hotel newspaper.”

“No, you’re going to do this. Got a pen?”

She handed me her fountain pen. “Finish that coat of polish,” I told her. She still had three fingernails to go, but instead of doing as she was told, she read over my shoulder as I wrote.

Here’s a story for you—the kind you find in an old library book with cobwebs between the pages. You know that book; you forget the title after you’ve returned it and over the years you try to look it up a few times, but you never find it again.

Once there was a pretty powerful magician. He spoke to the things around him, and as long as the thing he addressed had life in it, it obeyed him. “Barren tree, bear fruit,” he’d say. And no matter what had happened to the tree, no matter how ravaged its roots, the tree flourished. “Horse, grow wings,” he’d say, and the horse bowed its head as strong, finely plumed wings swept over its back. But that wasn’t how the magician made his living. Mostly he improved women’s looks for a fee. Women came to him themselves, or were brought to him by their ambitious mothers or diffident fathers. He’d look into a woman’s eyes and say: “You are a beauty,” and she heard the words and believed them so deeply that her features fell into either lush, soft harmony, or heartbreakingly strict symmetry—whichever suited her better. He’d say it to her only once, and it lasted the rest of her lifetime, so his fees were high. But the magician could also undo natural beauty, for a greater fee than the one he charged for beautifying. He sort of hoped the high fee would discourage people, but it didn’t. It was well-known that if your wife or daughter was unruly or otherwise deserving of punishment you could bring her to this magician, who would tell her, “Scarecrow, scarecrow . . .” He said it in such a way that the woman who heard him believed him, and the words did their work. It was a shame, and he didn’t like to do it, but business is business.

Mia snapped her fingers. “I remember how this one goes!”

“Great.” I was only too happy to push the paper over to her. I’ve always had a hard time figuring out what the moral of a story is supposed to be, and she was bound to know: She’d been to college.

Mia wrote.

One day a farmer came to the magician. “I’ve hesitated over this decision for many days, because my wife is very beautiful,” the farmer said. “Possibly the most beautiful woman in all the world. Still, I think you’d better make her ugly all the same. She frightens me; she frightens everyone who goes near her.”

“Frightens you?” the magician asked. “Frightens you how? And where is she?”

“She’s back at the farm.” The farmer shuffled his feet apologetically. “I tried to bring her with me, but she wouldn’t come.”