Braided Lives (16 page)

When he comes by on Thursday after his classes to pick up his loose-leaf, he asks with a wide grin, his eyebrows shoved high, have I read the journal?

“No. I kept my promise.”

“Good girl. I knew you would. You’re honest.”

But I could swear for an instant there’s a slackening of disappointment in his face.

CHAPTER NINE

I
N
W
HICH
J
ILL
C
ONSIDERS THE
T
EETH OF THE
L
ION

M
ARCH HAS TWO weathers, rain and snow, with sleet the median: sodden, frozen or half-and-half. The spongy earth sucks at our feet when we wander into the country. Branches drip like icy sores on our heads. We have no place to sit or stand or lean out of the rasping wind and the sniveling skies. Hands joined in Mike’s pocket, we walk between buildings that are great honeycombs of privacy from which we are shut out. We shuttle through the university searching a room some careless janitor left unlocked.

I know his days; I can see the buildings of campus and the streets of town like a chessboard where he alone moves crowned through the ranks of professors and pawns. At seven forty-five each morning I call to wake him. Now I must get up. I do not understand why he wants me to do this, as he is often too sleepy to say more than, “Morning, pumpkin. Damn, I’m sleepy. Up till three.”

Whenever our schedules can be wrenched to touch, we meet. Five minutes in the Diag, a square in front of the library where many paths of campus converge, five minutes in the drafty vestibule of the old romance languages building. Sometimes over coffee in the Union he shows me a poem. First he reads it in that special loud voice. Then he lets me look.

H
INC ILLAE LACRIMAE

At the windows dusted with grime he stood,

The stained shade flapping limply at half mast.

Disgust sat on his head like a monk’s hood

As he gazed upon the land of his brief past

And briefer future. He dreamed of knightly good

But found within and out mere nightly nastiness

of men who rutted, cheated as they could.

There boredom stretched its dominion smoking, vast:

The city prone with black thighs spread

to naked sport lit only by the lewd

and bloodshot sign that blinked inside his head.

The razor at his wrist first sipped, then chewed.

The new mouths in the spare flesh outspewed,

vomiting him whiter than the bed.

If I ask too many questions or am not quick enough in praise, or praise the wrong elements, he withdraws, hiding in his loose clothes. Carefully I proffer my reactions, grooming them to his pleasure.

One night prowling between homes where the blue glimmer of television shows through windows, we find a garage with doors ajar. Outside an icy drizzle falls, but in here the air is dry with a keen cold smell of paint and gasoline. We wedge ourselves between the grille of a Ford and a lawn mower leaning tipsily against the back wall. Coats unbuttoned we press together. “We’re safe for a bit,” he murmurs. “We’ve shut the Greyzies out.”

When I am with him time hangs in a queer stasis. We move into a dark pocket where there are only intensities of touch and stare. I keep my lids wide as we kiss, watching his eyes flow into one large eye. The Cyclops, we call it. His sliding hands cradle my belly, close over my breasts. I cling, hands groping at the taut bow of his backbone. I draw back and touch his eyelids with my tongue. Ice breaking in the veins and marrow loosing a flood of want, my body bends to him. He conjures me into motion unsensual, ascetic as an arrow eating its arc in air toward its target.

He mumbles in my hair. “Do you have any doubts?”

“Doubts?” I repeat, confused. We have argued about religion several times.

“Look. Either I love you or I’m crazy. Do you love me?”

I rock back against the car, clenching my hands on the cold grille. “That word! So fancy. I don’t know. I think so….” I trace his cheek. “Love is what stuck my parents together, gouging each other. Love is what Mother calls it when she reads my mail or my diary…. How can you tell?”

“I know. That’s how.”

“I don’t think I ever really loved anybody but Donna before—”

“Maybe you are queer.”

“Don’t be jealous of her. She brought us together.”

We leave the garage. As we cross the street a car passes, casting our shadows forward, great long-legged creatures with one fat joined arm. But Mike stalks in injured silence, staring ahead.

“Stu, what do you think you’re doing?” Donna kicks off her boots to pad over with a plaintive smile. “I brought you a roll from supper and an apple.”

I reach out of bed. “Thanks.”

“Are you sick? Did Mike do something?”

She has interrupted a prolonged fantasy on the meaning of those scraps of his journal I stole with my eyes, shamefully. I said I did not read it, but I read those fragments. C.: Cribbets? The singer he referred to, what happened between them? Whose pendulous breasts? Maybe I am just too naive for him. I roll off the bed quilt and fall onto the floor. My head bumps but I will not give my stupidity the consolation of rubbing it. “I’m such an idiot, Donna. Am I in love?”

“Holy mother, how do I know? Don’t you think so? You’ve used the word yourself. You’re mooning like a twelve-year-old.”

“I used it in its loose sense—like I love tangerines or Blake. You love Lennie?”

“Yes. And how!”

“What do you mean?”

She ruffles my hair. “I like to go to bed with him. I want to make him happy. If I don’t see him, I miss him. I’d marry him tomorrow if my folks wouldn’t blow a fuse. But none of that means the same as saying I love him.”

I run my nail along the radiator face, then catching her expression, stop. “I want experience. I want to use my life fully. But what I’ve fought for, waited for and finally got now is a little freedom.”

“You think he’s going to put you in a cage?”

“Love says, mine. Love says, I could eat you up. Love says, stay as you are, be my own private thing, don’t you dare have ideas I don’t share. Love has just got to gobble the other, bones and all, crunch. I don’t want to do that. I sure don’t want it done to me!”

She straddles her chair facing me, her navy skirt riding up. “What do you feel when you look at him?”

I reach for my jacket. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? Then you’re not in love.”

“I mean there isn’t any me. It’s as if I evaporated.”

“Where are you going? Don’t you want me to come with you?”

“Sorry for all this. I promise to come home sane.”

“Stu. If this is making you unhappy …” She taps her foot. “Don’t run away. Forget the sullen bastard!”

Most of the doors stand open on the corridor with after-supper traffic in and out. A buzzer rasps and a tall auburn-haired woman trips out to answer the phone, acrobatically running up the zipper on her skintight sheath dress over the girdle and waist cincher as she ankles past. Some backseat part of me would like to be courted at length and succumb with grace. Love on the rest of the corridor is pin-swapping, dulcet fraternity serenades, the swish of cocktail dresses, odorless corsages of small orchids. Why must I take decisions like a coal truck on a rutty road? Yet even as I pity myself, I remember our athletic chairman, Dulcie, with her lean competence and perennial tan, took an overdose of sleeping pills between semesters. The maid found her, Dulcie’s stomach was pumped and she spends several hours a week seeing a psychiatrist at the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute. She has taken off the engagement ring with the karat and a half diamond. Dulcie will not tell anybody what happened, so rumors are still proliferating.

The wide sky over the athletic field is deep blue, clear as a note from a tuning fork. In the west the bell tower and smokestacks of the heating plant, the bare upreaching trees, stand in two-dimensional obsidian sharp silhouettes against a lemon horizon. But what use is it to feel beauty if I have no one to share it with? An old lack. Have I got so used to loneliness I fight against breaching it? My mother has always called me a coward.

As I cross campus most buildings are dark, but for a slot of lights in a lab in the chemistry building, a vista of bleak halls where a Black janitor pushes a broom. I live in a white world now, I realize. Only two Black women in my whole dormitory and guess what, they room together although they clearly come from different parts of the country and cannot have requested each other. On the dormitory application they ask for a photograph and they also ask race. A stench of formaldehyde blows out the vent on the natural sciences building. Well, except as I live and act I am a sort of fetal pig myself, pink belly of shriveled innocence like the poor creatures we dissected in zoology for our lab final.

I turn away from campus through the streets of the town, the grey and white wooden houses, the arching oaks and maples. This is an attractive town, more spacious than my old neighborhood, one reason I like to walk here. Less often now because seeing Mike takes time. In a grey church a service is going on: in midweek? I thought they did that on Sunday. Light blends through stained-glass figures, tall and stoop-shouldered with faces in yellow fishbowls. All men, so it’s Protestant. At least the Catholics have a lady or two. A smell of drains around churches. How can something holy be clammy? What I find holy is the radiance of the particular, this light, this tree, the uniqueness of a face. Donna’s. His. When something moves me I want to seize it in my mind and write a poem that can make that energy happen again.

I remember going to church in Cold Springs at Uncle Edward the minister’s church. We had no choice. Grandfather, Uncle Edward, Aunt Jean and Aunt Mary all assumed real human beings were Presbyterians. I tried to mesh in childhood. Everybody in our neighborhood seemed to go to some damned church except for Callie and me. She lent herself to my games, content with her urchin’s wistful smile that a field should be a jungle or a Dakota encampment or an arctic tundra, if I said so. I lent myself to her home movies. “See, you got a gun and you twist my arm and tell me I got to. But at first I give you a real hard struggle. Then you push me down and you make me do it. Okay?” That virginity she was to give up so readily to Dino had fought first through the Perils of Pauline, only to submit on a heap of corpses under machine-gun fire with a bomb behind her head. Callie’s old room—before she got pregnant and had to marry Sharkie—shines in my head like a stained-glass window in blues, yellows and whites, her white bedstead, the blue glass pitcher I won for her at St. Luke’s carnival, a plastic doll dressed as a bride that we swiped at Kresge’s. When a train passed, the springs hummed like rails. I loved her, awkwardly, clumsily, patchily; but never told her so.

I find I have turned and walked toward Mike’s dormitory. Its lights rise over the wing of the Union. As I round the corner, I slow to a sedate walk. I do love him. I don’t believe in forever or clutching, but I love him. I’ll tell him right now. His dormitory has the same red-brick facade as mine but sprouts more wings and is much taller and bigger. Nine stories of men: embarrassing.

The anonymous rows of lights usurp the sky. Worse, as I cross the street to enter the court, I see that every wing has an entrance. Of course, the boys have no curfew; they don’t sign in and out as we do. I see no women around. Women are not allowed in the men’s rooms any more than they are in ours, but women do not go to the men’s quarters as men come to ours to fetch us and return us again. Perhaps there is no desk to summon him? I imagine blundering through corridors, stumbling panicked into wrong rooms, mocked, laughed at. This place feels off limits. A guy leans out his fourth-floor window.

“Hey, honey. Looking for me? What are you looking for? You want it, honey?”

Although I pretend I cannot hear him, I turn away. I imagine yelling out loud, “Mike! Mike!” until I hear my voice bouncing off the walls and my neck heats as if I’d done it. How do I know he’s home? I realize with a spongy sinking in my gut that I am not going to have the nerve to barge through the nearest door and ask directions. I cannot wish him out of that blazing rabbit warren. I am already turning as I think, I should have just walked in.

I go back to my dormitory but I cannot yet face Donna. She represents a set of demands. The first, that I become involved with a man, I have fulfilled. The second, that my involvement mirror hers with Lennie, I am just beginning to reject. She does not want me as obsessed with Mike as I am becoming. I consider Julie and reject her, for I am in no mood for clever chatter or gossip. I go into the next house and head for Theo’s single room.