Dry Your Smile (23 page)

Most of all Bram understood how it feels to be a child playing at being a child. How they expect that indignity of you as well, and how scared you are they'll reject you if you're not convincing.

It's the reason I intend never to have a child. I think it's vicious to grasp someone's life and mould it to your own liking.

But I will marry.

She could never get a man to stay with her.
I
will, by god.

She could never imagine herself
not
being a mother (so she says). I can't imagine myself
being
one.

Take that, beloved enemy my mother. We're utterly different, you and I. Exact opposites.

All day today I've been wondering how I can be so
petty
in my feelings toward Hope. Sometimes I almost take a perverse pleasure in her obstructing me, as if that gave me more ammunition for eventual vengeance, as if I were storing it up to explode in one blast strong enough to fling me free of her. Eventually she'll die and I'll be left alive, the stronger even if only by default.

My god, what a terrible thing to think, and to write down, about your own mother! I
must
be sick.

Re-reading what I wrote yesterday makes me realize all over again how creepy it is that I came out of her body. I don't feel as if I'm in my
own
, but I
know
I was in
hers
. I wash me, dress me, feed me. I urinate and defecate. But where I really
live
is inside my head. I've never once cared beans for sports or athletic stuff, I guess. I do masturbate. The psychology books seem divided on whether that's good or not. Anyway, that's one thing I
do
do down in my body. Of course, never having had a damned room of my own, even here in the long-promised holy land of a Sutton Place apartment, I learned long ago how to masturbate real fast, in the bathroom. I must be the fastest hand in the East. Door locked, sink water running, zip bang whoosh three minutes flat. Then flush as if you'd used the toilet, and emerge (not even breathing heavily) before she can ask why the door is locked or say what are you doing in there that's taking so long don't you know reading on the toilet will give you piles.

Somehow it's all connected to the way I feel about my body. It's short, short-waisted, too. Small-boned, but tending toward the plump. Like hers. Yet without her good features—even teeth, pale skin, large eyes.

I make me sick. Breasts too big (and have been since I was fourteen; they had to use binders to flatten them for certain roles so I could look younger). Nose too large. Eyes too small. Hair thin and given to stringiness, though I did win the Battle of the Blonde and got her to let me return to my own color—which is, I have to confess, a revolting mousey brown. Ick. But I'm stuck with the principle of the thing. My face is still baby-fat round.
Yuchk
. Barbara said all teenage women (she actually said
women
) felt this way about their bodies—too tall or short or fat or thin—and that I was quite different from Hope and should have compassion on myself and give myself time.

Well, Barbara's gone and Hope's still here.

And face it, Julian. Even if it
was
with money you earned, Hope
paid
Barbara to be your tutor and your friend, as Hope so delicately reminded you. When the payment stopped, the visits stopped. That day I ran into Barbara by chance in the public library I was afraid I might start crying. But I used to be able to tell her things I'd never uttered aloud to anybody, so this time, too, I came right out and
said
it:

“Why didn't you ever call or write or anything, Barbara? It's been six months almost.”

For the first time ever, she didn't look me right in the eye. She fiddled with her pinky ring. Then she did look me in the eye.

“Julian. I respect you. I loved … teaching you, working with you. You're a remarkable young person.”

It was so good to hear. I had to clench my jaw to stop the lump in my throat.

“Couldn't we still—I don't mean you should tutor me or anything, certainly not for free. But just … I thought we were friends.”

“It's not for me to come between you and your mother. She loves you and wants only what she believes is best for you.”

“You mean if you and I went on being friends, it might get me into hot water with Hope? I wouldn't care, Barbara. Honest. I'm already in hot water with her most of the time. And I really miss—”

“I mean that if you and I were to be friends it would get
me
into hot water, as you put it, with your mother. I can't afford that. I'm sorry.”

“You mean she would try one of those ominous threats of hers? Like saying you should lose your tutoring license because you didn't challenge me enough or some baloney like that? She would never really—”

“I mean she could … Yes, something like that.”

I felt panicky. I just couldn't let her disappear from my life again. I started babbling.

“Barbara, look, I could explain to her,” I said. “Maybe if she
understood
what talking with you means to me, that I
miss
it so. There's nobody … I mean, literature and art and politics and … even the music you introduced me to. I mean,
Bach
. I've been trying to write sonnets, Barbara. Petrarchan and Shakespearean both. I've been sending them out to the little poetry magazines. I've been reading Karen Horney's psychological books, like you suggested. I joined the NAACP and I went to a memorial rally for Hiroshima last August. I'm trying to get out of acting altogether. I—Barbara, I—”

“Julian. Oh Julian,” was all she said.

Then I got embarrassed, like some nagging kid. So we just stood there and didn't say anything. Then she cleared her throat and looked at me again.

“There are some things I can't … I think that your mother misunderstood the way I worked with you as your tutor. I think anything you would say to her to explain differently might only confirm her misunderstanding. And I'm afraid that her misunderstanding is profound.”

“But
I
understand. I'm a separate
person
from her. Maybe we wouldn't even have to tell her?
I
understand—”

“Not everything,” she cut in, with that little half-smile of hers she used to wear when asking me things like “So you feel Sophocles telegraphs his endings in advance?”

“Well, of course not
every
—”

“There are some things you don't understand that I can't teach you. For my own reasons. Not even because of Hope.”

I certainly didn't understand. I still don't. But that day I just stood there feeling like I'd been left behind without even a map to help me catch up. All I could manage to say was,

“I guess that's that. I hope you enjoy working with your other students, Barbara. I envy them. I loathe the tutor I have now. You wouldn't
believe
how
revolting
he—”

“I have to go, Julian, I'm late. Forgive me.”

“Sure, sure. I have to go, too. Well …”

“I'm glad we ran into each other. I think about you often.”

“Oh well, don't bother. I know how busy you are and … I am, too. Actually, my new tutor keeps me hopping with assignments, so I'm really very stimulated. I'm just fine.” I knew she could see right through me but I couldn't help myself.

We said goodbye and started walking in different directions. Then I heard my name and I turned around.

“Julian,” she called, “send me a signed copy of your first published book someday? I'll buy all the rest of them, one by one as they come out, myself.”

Then she waved and walked away.

So that was it. And I still don't understand. But I have to
face
it. It's been over a year now, with no word. In Hope's lovingly brutal phrase: “She dropped you, dear.”

Well, Barbara left me something, anyway. I can retreat into my brain—away from Hope and Hope's body, my life and my body, this showy apartment and the embroidery of lies we live with here. If I had a room of my own! (Virginia, how right you were.) Then I think how Jane Austen wrote at the kitchen table while running her father's parsonage, so that's no excuse. Hope, naturally, always points out to me (and everyone else) how well off I am. I suppose I am. People are starving. But my being well off isn't of any use to
me
, so what's the good of it?

I get these depressed fits of laziness where I don't want to do a thing around the apartment, especially since it's
her
home, not mine. Then there are my weird surges of housework flurry, when I feel I can't
bear
the disorder anymore or her indifference to it. So I attack the kitchen. It drives me crazy how she never washes a pot or pan properly. What's she got against kitchen utensils, anyway? She's a lousy cook (her lamb chops always are so well done they bounce on your plate when you try to cut them, and her vegetables are so overcooked that whether they start out red, yellow, or green, they end up a uniform gray). Consequently, I'm a pretty good cook. On the other hand, she's very skillful with a needle (oh the ghosts of those organdies!), so I
refuse
to learn to sew.

Sometimes I make a foray on what I've named The Ironing Closet. The Ironing Closet is an otherwise ordinary closet into which Hope stuffs the clean laundry she insists one of us do at the building's free laundromat machines in the basement. It's so like her—to spend tons of money on this apartment but not give me a room of my own (and what about a room of
her
own?); to scrimp by not sending stuff to a laundry but then leave it indefinitely, clean but scrunched up, in that closet. So when you open the door, blouses, towels, underwear, lacy placemats, all come fluttering down on your head. She hates ironing but doesn't like me to do it. Maybe she thinks I'll burn something, like my precious commodity self. Yet she procrastinates doing it, so there always are washed but totally unwearable clothes piling up until there's a fight and she sighs like a martyr and does the ironing.

I am such a
petty
person!

Today I had to miss the class on Provençal poetry I've been attending (non-matriculating of course) at Columbia. Why? Because there was no other time in the world except those three hours for us to tape this
cankerous, suppurative
“public service” commercial for U.S. Savings Bonds. (I've been using the thesaurus, like Barbara said, and it really does expand your adjectives). Anyway, the Ideal American Girl, now Ideal American Teenager (doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, doesn't date, doesn't swear, doesn't EVER revolt, doesn't LIVE) had to tell the television audience how super-dooper it was to invest in Eisenhower-Nixon America. (I hope that Kennedy guy
does
get nominated and even elected, never mind if he is Catholic. I only wish I could vote.) Before Barbara, I used to detest doing this sort of patriotism thing just because it felt goody-goody. Then she introduced politics into my life. So now I know about the difference between socialism and communism, about how the Korean War was complicated, about South Africa. (And my own mother
believed
all that
crap
that McCarthy did a service to the country!) So now I know. Thanks a
lot
, Barbara. Now I have
more
reasons for wanting to gag when I have to go through one of these wholesome Ideal American Girl things. Like being Queen of the Boy Scouts' Ball—which is supposed to make up for my not being allowed to see Bramwell?

I don't see any way out of this except by waiting, getting older. Meanwhile, I do it: “I hope
other
young people will
realize
, as
I
do, the
vital
importance of building our country's
future
along with our
individual
futures vomit vomit.”

Between the intention and the gesture falls the shadow, to misquote T. S. Eliot. (Thank you, Barbara.) I think the child actor is conscious of that T. S. Eliot gap all the time. It makes you think the whole world is a two-dimensional painted set.

Barbara used to do her Socrates act with me and ask, “Then what is real?” She'd be right. The family? Hope and I are a “family”—the widow and her half-orphan. A college degree? Which I'll probably never get because Hope won't let me go away to school and because having been tutored now for so many years since I was twelve I'm terribly uneven—graduate level in literature and philosophy and the like, but still probably hovering around grade 6 in science: there's just so many lab experiments you can do in a kitchen, particularly one with crusted pots and pans. Yet I've met college graduates who are honestly not very bright. So is their degree “real”?

Is
age
real? Not only can I act older or younger, I can
feel
older or younger, depending on the situation. Is race real? Apostate Jews that we are, is it hypocritical that Hope plans a
seder
every Pesach (lassit
ud
inous annual event attended by her broker, my agent, one or two of her “girlfriends,” and helpless me)? For that matter, are Jews a religion or a race or what? For that matter, am I a Jew? Or a girl? Or a woman? Or seventeen? Or an actress? Or a writer? Or a daughter like Goneril or one like Cordelia? Or stark raving mad?

This is ridiculous. I ought to put down some of the good moments. Like yesterday, when I learned that years before I was born, she had loved a poem of William Blake's I had just discovered in
Songs of Innocence
. Who would have thought it of her? The tender moments, the way her smile can make me feel. Her sudden shocking rare miraculous
comprehension!

She always manages to send me white lilacs on my birthday, and they're sure not in season in October. But she knows I love them, and I guess she orders them way in advance; I bet they're flown in from somewhere at an exorbitant price. The way she'll buy me a book she knows I want, but be uninterested in my telling her about it after I've read it. Still, she'll buy it for me—as a surprise, an un-birthday, or a gift for one of the billions of holidays she celebrates: Chinese New Year, Ramadan, Easter and Pesach and Succoth,
and
all the secular ones, July Fourth, Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, the works. Right around this time of year, with Christmas and Hannukah overlapping, plus New Year's, it drives me especially nuts, but I have to admit that in her frenzy to assimilate, she certainly is ecumenical.