Braided Lives (24 page)

“Two hundred! After his last exam I’ll hit Mike. I can’t risk throwing him off stride.” I squat at the shelves. “We could sell our books too.” I squelch a pang of anticipatory loss. “It can’t be true!”

“Yeah, like getting struck by lightning. Why me?”

I put my arm around her shoulders. “We’ll get pledges, but don’t believe it.”

“Suppose something goes wrong? Suppose I bleed to death? Do they cut you open?”

“Shhh. We’ll go to a real doctor.” She feels breakable. Through the straw of her hair her pink scalp shows faintly, damp with sweat.

“So much money down the rathole. You know I think if I went to Peter and asked him myself, I bet he’d loan me money.” Slowly her body relaxes. “I’d have the nerve, I know I would. The hair of the dog —you wouldn’t think I’d get ideas about men.”

My arm around her shoulders is beginning to ache. “You can ask him.” Peter: air of polite chill, the planting of a dart. What does she see in him?

“Stu, life is so simple for those fireproof pink bitches down the hall. They give nothing, they never get hurt. Or am I just jealous because they’re innocent?”

“What’s innocent about them—their politics? The candles they burn before Saint McCarthy? Their pocketbooks?”

“Their idea of conflict is being on a diet, or giving up chocolates for Lent.” Her hands tighten on her belly. “What am I going to do? I keep seeing pregnant women in the street like whales.”

I rise. “Lennie and I will worry about money. You just study.” Shoving the drapery aside, I lean out. Smell of damp grass. A bell dongs. “Two, already. Try to sleep.” I feel soggy yet I can still touch a core of alert concentration like a scalpel embedded in a sponge. Ah, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—that’s when it began. People with my eyes. Across the court a light winks out. Our friends in their beds must pay a bit of the price to buy Donna free. In trouble how we need goodwill, far more than we have ever earned.

Dear Jill,

No, nothing is wrong here. Matt finally left just in time for your mother to get your room ready. In a huff he went down and enlisted. Your mother burned her hand ironing, which is why she hasn’t written.

I am glad to be done with roomers for a while. We did not find the ideal. According to your mother he would not smoke, drink, entertain callers, use the bathroom facilities, receive or make phone calls. He would leave at 7 a.m. and not return till 10 p.m., when he would go directly to bed or sit quietly without burning electricity.

Have you been following the baseball season? I think if they don’t develop more strength in the bullpen, the Tigers are in trouble. Don’t stay up late. A little study at a time is better than haste at the end.

Love, Dad

In the stream of students, Mike appears from his German final. I jump from the grass. “Over here! How did you do?”

“Don’t ask. Don’t talk about it.” He strikes a match that goes out, strikes another. “Hopped up with Dexedrine. I must have filled three bluebooks.”

The benches along the walks are empty, the campus a quiet park. Most students have left and the rest are buried in study halls or exam rooms. I grip his arm. “Donna went for a pregnancy test today.” And didn’t come back. We were to spend the early afternoon selling our books.

“What?” He breaks stride.

“She’s fourteen days late.”

He whistles. “They must have been careless.”

“Donna says no. They always use a condom, like us.”

He walks more quickly uphill, past a girl wheeling a trunk. We no longer touch as we walk.

“I have twenty-two dollars. Donna has thirty and Lennie has twenty-four and he borrowed forty. What can you spare us?”

“What are you talking about?”

“For her abortion, if she is pregnant. We need at least two hundred, maybe two fifty. Can you borrow anything? How about hitting your friend Van?” My words tumble out. I have patiently held this in till the end of finals. “She’ll save what she can this summer, working, and pay us all back in the fall.”

“You want me to give her money for an abortion?”

“A loan. Not a gift. She can pay you back first.”

“And you assume I’ll chip right in.” He strides along swinging his arms in an exaggerated way, lines pulling at his forehead.

I skip to catch up. “We’re only taking pledges. She’s off getting a lab test.” We pass my dorm on the way to the Arb.

“I won’t help finance murder.”

“Aw, come on, Mike. Murder? Don’t be legalistic!” The casements are open, the draperies on our windows drawn against the sun as I left them. Suppose she panicked and didn’t take the test, another day lost with time running out?

“You’re no nitwit. It’s murder no matter how you slice it.”

We cross and begin the descent to the Arb. “Having a baby you don’t want is slower murder. For both of you.”

“If you don’t believe life is sacred, nothing’s left. It just all comes to death and eating a banana is just like knifing your father.”

“Bullshit, Mike! That’s just words. A fancy position for a man to take, I mean it. I care about Donna. I’m willing for chickens and cows to die to feed her, and this embryo to keep her free.”

“Shut up and listen. It was in the papers, a man robbed a grocery. He held up the grocer with a gun and to scare him, he fired in the air. The bullet went through a curtain and killed the man’s wife, who was hiding there.”

“Donna’s real. An embryo’s only potential. I don’t want any baby born ever who isn’t wanted, chosen, waited for.”

“Like that man, you want to kill someone you’ve never seen.”

“It’s her body—don’t you see that? She’s no incubator, neither am I. What do you want her to do—have the baby and quit school? Go on welfare? Ask Lennie to marry her? Kill herself?”

“That’s her business. What do you expect from someone who’d fool around in their own family?”

“What was that— How do you know about her brother-in-law?”

“Lennie, of course.”

“He told you? How could he!”

“He’s a decent guy. The story shocked him. She’s got the morals of an alley cat.”

“Why are you so highfaluting moral all of a sudden? What are we going here to do but fuck, just like them!”

“It’s not the same.” He grabs me by the shoulders. “And you’re not the same as that little shikseh bitch!”

“Mike, don’t even start that! I’m a mongrel and don’t forget it. You’re as bad as her parents.”

“Just because she’s your cousin you don’t have to worship her. She’s always trying to undermine me.”

“Mike, she wanted me to like you. You’re crazy!”

“What did you call me?” He moves to block my path, glaring.

I have been shouting at him. That scares me. I swallow my voice small and say, “I mean irrational about this.”

“Pumpkin informs me I’m irrational!” His voice is mild with a forced control worse than rage. “I told you my reasons while you just moan hysterically about that bitch. You want to break laws and take ridiculous risks that could get us all into trouble. Haven’t you said you know I’m the more intelligent?”

I am a little shocked. He knows more than I do. I’ve said that. “Sometimes I can be right. I don’t want any child born who isn’t wanted. Really wanted.”

“Better to kill him unseen?”

“‘Man’s happiest lot is not to be’—didn’t you quote that Sophocles at me when you were going on about the ecstasy of suicide?” How did these privet leaves get into my hand? I am tearing them. The sunlight cuts my eyes like broken glass. “Those sperm you slough off in the bushes or flush away—murder? Nature is waste. Women—Donna and I—can breed fifteen, twenty children from our wombs like litters of puppies before we die of exhaustion.”

“Nature is waste! Jill’s doing her own thinking now. First you scream at me and call me insane—”

I reek misery. “I’m sorry. I said I’m sorry.” It comes down to him siding with fathers, the heavy-bearded fathers of his imagination who say no to women and turn us to pillars of salt.

“Why should you run around begging money to cover her?”

“I’m responsible for her. She’s my best friend.”

“What about me? We’re back to Plato’s round men. Either your missing half is me or you’re a lesbian and your other half is Donna. There’s that bad experience with Callie you told me about.”

A dank weight of hopelessness settles in me. What was bad about it? It was the only warm thing in my life when I hated school, when I felt a misfit, when my mother no longer held or caressed me, for I had become sickly and skinny and too smart and uppity. “I love you. How can you refuse to believe that?”

“If you really love me, if you loved me as much as I love you, other people wouldn’t matter. You wouldn’t carry on about her.”

“She’s in trouble! If you love somebody, why should it make you despise other people? I don’t believe that!”

“Because you don’t love me as much as I love you. You’re scattered. All I need in this life are you, that letter Pound wrote me and a handful of truly great poems.”

I would say food, water, a little sleep. Talk. Writing. Do I
need
him? What does it mean to be needed? “You won’t help us, so let’s just forget it.”

He stands hunched over me. “Suppose I tell you not to interfere?”

“You can’t. I have to follow my own conscience.”

“Against what you admit are my right reasons? Even if I ask you not to?”

Right reasons? Alien moralizing. He tries to twist me in his hands. “I have to.”

“Because you don’t love me enough to do what I ask.”

“Mike! Stop it!” I explode into tears and after watching me weep, he puts his arms around me, stroking my hair and murmuring, “There, pumpkin, there’s my baby.” What are words for if I cannot make him hear me? He plays the father when I cry. As we walk off across the plateau he cradles my hand in his and hums, as if because I cried and he did not, he has won.

He stops short. “Is that rain?”

A light pattering in the trees. “Must be the wind.”

“Must be.” We walk on. Then he flings out his arm to stop me. “Hey!”

Before my face a wizened caterpillar the color of a dried leaf turns slowly in midair. I stumble back. From the caterpillar a filament reaches into the leaves overhead. “That’s the sound. These trees are being eaten up. Let’s get out of here.”

“There’s noplace to go. Maybe they don’t eat pine needles,” he says.

We pick our way through crackling woods where leaves break off and float down, past a small maple shrouded in gauze webs. Under the pines no caterpillars hang, at last, only mosquitoes that whine around us. To keep them off we light a small illegal fire of twigs inside our hearth. Under the smoke we lie on our bellies eating partly cooked, partly raw hot dogs, charred on the outside and cold at the center.

Then on the needles we move in toward each other as so many times. Love is a heavy thing, I think, still worrying at that hard bone,
need.
What does it mean to need someone? It feels to me like being turned or turning him into a thing.

As I walk wearily along the corridor, no splashing, no singing, no laughter comes from the shower room. Luggage waits outside doors. Near our door the drive of Bartok’s Second Piano Concerto comes muffled. As I open the door it hits me pulsing. In bra and pajama bottoms, Donna is doing a bump and grindy ballet.

“Hey, what?” I stare at her. “Are you okay?”

Her face crinkled in a grin, she throws her arms around me, breathing sour wine. “I started! Right after we left the doctor’s office.” She stops to catch her breath. “Oh, Stu, I’m so happy I’m out of my mind!”

“But where were you?”

“I got such horrible cramps I had to lie down at Lennie’s. I’m still cramping and bleeding in gouts, but I’m so full of aspirin and wine I don’t feel a thing. Have some Chianti—it’s on my desk.”

I fill one of the plastic cups we use for instant coffee. “What a relief. Donna, hallelujah! We’re safe.”

“Everybody’s been such good guys to me.” Donna shuts the volume down by half. Turning to me, her face folds in on itself. “This summer scares me, Stu. Nothing’s duller than Flint in the summer. Except Flint in the winter.”

“Please don’t get in any trouble. Please. Read and make money. Don’t even talk to a man.”

“There’s no one to talk to. How can I get into trouble in Flint? I’ll miss Lennie like crazy.”

Already his green nudes are gone and Mike’s tomes returned. The cozy network of our life will be dismantled tomorrow and we’ll leave this nest as bare as we found it. “I’ll miss you, Donna. I’m a little scared too. Next summer, maybe, let’s go to school.”

She sits rubbing her belly. “I think I’ll take another couple of aspirins. What a long lonely summer it’s going to be….”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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