Daughters of the Revolution (10 page)

He slipped the drawing into the waistband of his boxer shorts and entered the residence by the side door. He’d removed his cassock earlier, in the sacristy. Now he wore khaki slacks, a shirt and his collar.

He climbed the stairs to the room he shared with his wife. (No, Jeanne hadn’t sent him away; she might not—she washed her hands more than ever, but they’d had relations several times since his disgrace.) She seemed more receptive after his betrayal, more awake, the intimacy a collusion between them. He set his watch on the bureau. He removed EV’s drawing from the band of his shorts, folded it carefully and laid it between the pages of the Bible by his bed—Jeanne would never look there. (Was the drawing incriminating? Yes, it was. A drawing given to him by a young girl. It could ruin his life—but his life was already ruined.) Other incriminating pieces of paper in his Bible presented themselves: an old slip on which he had written, “First, they prayed; and then they needed God”; another slip, this one with just one line in red, like a fortune cookie: “behold, I am vile.” He stripped away his clothes and dressed in shorts (Goode School Lacrosse), a T-shirt, athletic socks and sneakers. But just as he prepared to run out the door, the telephone rang. It was Goddard Byrd. “I’ve been thinking about you, old man. You’d better come by the house and have a drink.” And so instead of running around and around the track at Goode, spending himself in concentric circles of mind-numbing effort, Bill Reiss
ran to the town square, past the handsomely preserved stocks, where a man like himself might be left to rot, and then up to the red-hot front door of God’s house, which he pecked at with the brass jaw of a lion. There he spent the afternoon drinking gin with the fallen head, his old ally, in his lair, talking about Nixon and the crimes of other men.

O
ne Sunday morning—it must have been during the March break—Mei-Mei drove me out to the peat bog at the edge of Cape Wilde to see the damage the beavers had done. She showed me birch tree trunks gnawed to pencil points, the meat of the tree beneath the bark pink and injured-looking. We walked along frozen dirt and dry grass, the scabbed winter surface of earth, and surveyed the pond, the dam and the domes of wadded mud and sticks—the lodges the beavers made to live in. The beavers
engineered
their lodges, Mei-Mei said; they did it mathematically, by instinct, though she didn’t elaborate on that aspect, as engineering and math don’t interest her. She pointed out how the entrances and exits were both underwater, for security; ramps from the entrances led to platforms where the beavers lived. It was perfectly mathematical, Mei-Mei said, and yet, someone, somewhere, had made a fatal mistake, for the house filled up with water. Even though beavers can hold their breath for up to fifteen minutes, something went terribly, terribly wrong, and all the beaver family drowned.

This is the kind of story that grabs Mei-Mei, a story of miscalculation, accident, death—especially death by drowning—and explains the world to her. This is Mei-Mei’s sermon: “Why We Love Hell.” Any sketch of her would be incomplete without the list of bad ends she pours out to me on Sunday mornings when, instead of more formal moral cleansing, we now spill parables via telephone. The man who lost his private parts to an explosion on a gas toilet. The man who had a sex change
at midlife. (Can you imagine, asks Mei-Mei, waking up as a middle-aged woman?) The disgruntled man who killed his estranged wife with a two-by-four and encased her in fiber-glass. The woman with three children who murdered a Wellesley math professor (emerita) with a stone cat over a money dispute; a former classmate of mine who hanged herself with a bed-sheet in the county jail. I could go on; I will go on. The murderer who came into Smith’s house; Smith offered the murderer a beer, which the murderer drank, and then he went on down the road and murdered someone else. The man whose wife tried for twenty years to commit suicide every time he left her alone. The former chair of the historical society whose wife developed Alzheimer’s. He went out to a meeting but forgot his key. When he returned to the house, she wouldn’t open the door because she didn’t remember who he was; he lost three fingers to frostbite, rapping on the door all night. The moral of Mei-Mei’s stories is always the same. Disaster is a genius, lurking. Be careful! Don’t die!

Mei-Mei’s identity is wrapped in her tragedy. She is defined, engrossed and fulfilled by it. Maybe for this reason, I am a relentless optimist. As a small child, I learned to see in the dark. My pupils grew until they found the bright spot in a black hole. Optimism boils constantly in me, like one of those endless Sunday stews on the back burner—the tough cut of my soul, relentlessly tenderizing over a flame. To her, the grimmest stories make sense.

1
.

The story could begin anywhere, anytime, say the end of the 1970s, say Northampton, Massachusetts, with desire or violence. My new housemates and I made dinner for a couple of boys. We said things like “Do you think gender matters? Gender doesn’t matter. What matters is if you like the person.” And “Even liking the person doesn’t matter. What matters is the human connection.”

“Matters to what? What matters?” we asked.

“That’s just it,” Karim said.

We took off our clothes, a gesture that Karim, an interdisciplinary studies major and slightly older than the rest of us, called “consensual sensuality.” We spent the night on the couches in the living room, engaged in delicate and subtle politics, and in the morning were casual and cruel over coffee.

“What are you doing for winter break?” someone asked.

Plans bloomed like showy annuals: internships with the Shakespeare Company or the Women’s Health Collective; meetings
of the Clamshell Alliance; sit-ins for divestiture in South Africa.

“Nothing is going to happen to any of you, ever,” Karim said. He himself was about to go to the Amazon. He had just come back from India, where he’d lived in an ashram, studied yoga, bathed lepers. He described the method he’d used for not getting run over by buses or cars: a technique of walking with exquisite slowness directly into traffic. But then he said that in India pedestrians had no rights; a pedestrian who was hit by a truck was expected to apologize. (Karim himself possessed an aggressive, righteous humility.) His contempt for English literature and Western civilization was complete.

“What do these books teach you, that privileged white people from the West are the center of the universe, the names of flowers in Kew Gardens, how to flense a leviathan?” He plucked my copy of
Moby-Dick
, which I hadn’t cracked yet, from the coffee table. “The interior thoughts of dead white men,” Karim said—the first time I’d heard anyone speak with such direct contempt for white men who were dead.

“The real question,” Karim said, hefting and then tossing the book down among the bikini panties and bottles of Mateus, “the
only
question, is, What will you do in life to offset what you do to drain the planet’s resources by breathing, eating, living in a house, driving a car, probably producing another child or two for the earth to feed? I have lived in a cardboard box in Egypt, okay? I have bathed lepers in Calcutta. Okay? What has all this freedom, paid for in napalm, taught you about the world? What have you experienced, really, really? What will you do to mitigate the impact of your life?” He reached down and massaged his penis, amusing himself while he waited to be surprised. But I could think of nothing—not yet.

2
.

Junior year, my roommate, Jess, borrowed my little black dress to go out on a date. We were the same size and shape—though I’d already begun my secret practice of self-denial—and we had the same qualities of character, sincerity and earnestness, which I already despised. As she poked pearls into her ears, Jess said, “I’m not going to sleep with this guy. I’m not going to sleep with anyone until I’m married.”

“Why not?” I asked her. “For what possible reason?”

Jess removed a blow-dryer from the top drawer of her dresser. “I want to keep my place in heaven,” she said.

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not,” Jess said. “There’s a place in heaven for every Catholic unless they, you know, screw up.”

“What about the rest of us?”

“You’ll go to hell,” Jess said matter-of-factly. She bent at the waist, turned her hair upside down and blew it out. When she finished, she rewound the cord around the blow-dryer and put it back in her drawer.

Jess started out premed, but it was too hard. She almost flunked out her first year, taking biology, chemistry and calculus. She went to the library at all hours, but it made me sad whenever I saw Jess’s tidy pages of notes. That wasn’t how serious work was done, I felt—with diligence, neatness and care. Jess spent most of her time at the library, trying to keep her grades up so she could make the most of her life and not end up spending it
putting the green bulb into stoplights, like her mother did in the old factory. For fun, she led the a cappella group, as she’d done in high school. The medley she sang at the opening of every concert pricked my own convoluted desire for jazz and sex, and I used to sing it word for word—my own version of her voice yawping out lyrics from
Showboat
in the shower—until I discovered that everyone in the dorm could hear.

Premed was an ambition for Jess, not a gift or a passion, and finally, fearing for her full scholarship, she switched to English literature. “Because it’s easy,” she said.

“It’s not that easy,” I said.

Jess rolled her eyes. “Believe me, it’s easy. I already know how to read.” She didn’t have much patience for literature, though. She found Henry James “boring,” D. H. Lawrence “pornographic,” Virginia Woolf “wordy.” She liked James Joyce—but only
Dubliners
. She preferred story and action; she’d been the editor of her high school newspaper. She loved meeting people, shaping news, and changed to journalism.

We drifted apart. Apart from superficial differences—I was greedy and unsupervised, Jess devout and Catholic—she reminded me too much of myself: cheerful, literal, soft, pliant. I don’t know what I reminded her of, but in November, Jess applied to change roommates. I didn’t object, but by Thanksgiving neither of us had made other arrangements.

“It’s not that big a deal,” I said. “December, January. Then February, March, April and May. I can stand it. Can you?”

During winter break, we had no classes, were urged to find meaningful work exploring careers, advancing social justice or reveling in the arts. Jess found an internship at a radio station outside Denver. She’d worked in the dining room all fall to pay for her flight. She’d live with an aunt and uncle in a nearby suburb, just a bus ride away. Her conservative parents approved;
she’d be safe. She even bought herself a cheap wedding ring to keep herself honest.

My great-aunt Ruth died around Thanksgiving and left me a surprise legacy, a matter of a few hundred dollars, which, she stipulated in her will, must be spent on “self-improvement.” Aunt Ruth had famously been “wild” until sometime before I was born, and her father, my great-grandfather, brought in a doctor to scramble her frontal lobe. After the operation, nothing new ever happened to Aunt Ruth. She worked at the pharmacy soda fountain for thirty-five years, had no friends, no lovers or husbands. No one ever asked her what she thought or felt, or what had happened to her; everyone knew what had happened. (She’d been “wild.”) After Aunt Ruth died (ruptured appendix, staph infection), Mei-Mei got a telephone call and we had to run down to the boardinghouse where Aunt Ruth had lived and remove an outrageous mass of pornographic magazines from under her bed. She was the princess and the pea of pornography, her mattress all in lumps.

Mei-Mei, kneeling, dropped the men’s magazines into a Seagram’s box. “Don’t you see what this means?” she asked. “The procedure freed Aunt Ruth of her anxiety, but not of her yearning.”

“Where did she buy them? How? When?” I asked, impressed.

“Oh, she was clever,” Mei-Mei said. “Plus, she worked at the pharmacy.”

The magazines filled the Seagram’s box. “We can’t just throw these out,” Mei-Mei said. “Where would we throw them?” She decided to keep the magazines under her own bed. In the early part of winter break, while Mei-Mei worked, I read them all. Aunt Ruth’s magazines were my first real experience of multiple points of view, in which I played the reader, the watcher, the consumer, the pleasure seeker, yet also indentified with the
object, the woman, a voluptuous form of myself, my gender archetype. I became the watcher and the watched, the subject and the object. My critical awareness developed, too—I became critical of the pictures, looked for ways in which they assumed maleness in the viewer, and yet also spoke to my own desires to be seen, to see myself. I learned the structure, the shape of the sexual story. The magazines called to me more strongly than
Moby-Dick
, which I’d been assigned for a course called Leviathans of Literature: Scaling the Immense American Novel.

What did Aunt Ruth expect me to do with her money? Make up for her lost life? Should I read her gift as an expansive, bold gesture, or a pathetic, desperate one? The sum was too small to dent tuition or loans, so I spent it all on airfare and a hotel on an island in the Caribbean during winter break—the same island where the Rebozos family once had a house, and where Carole Faust was born. I didn’t tell anyone except Jess, out of some perverse desire, probably, to shock her. (I told Mei-Mei a temporary job in the registrar’s office had opened up; I’d always been secretive, like Ruth.) At school, I packed a straw bag, then took a taxi to the airport; I’d never gone anywhere on my own before.