Dry Your Smile (45 page)

Shock. Hilarity. Miracle. I must be carrying around the most distinguished set of feminist keys any hobo activist ever possessed. I've been at five, no six, different apartments since Georgi's, from which I had to move on because her sister was coming for a visit. Iliana calls me “dear derelict” and thinks I'm crazy not to just come to her and light in one place from which I'll know I won't have to move on. But I resist that, particularly since she and I grow closer all the time and the energy between us is becoming rather charged. More than I could handle in a living situation, I think.

There are places I could stay longer than a few days or a week, of course—like the Brooklyn collective. But I don't want to be over in Brooklyn and I've never been big on collective living and this is not the time for experimentation. I also feel awkward putting too much weight on any one friend for too long.

Besides, curious as it seems, there's a grotesque freedom to all this. Some days it feels like I'm simply on a prolonged lecture/organizing trip, that home will be there, reassuringly familiar, at the end of it. I prided myself on knowing how to pack, how to travel efficiently. But now I'm learning for the first time a kind of nomadic, pared-down existence—and there's something chaste, almost purifying about it. Only those clothes you can carry with you, layering or unlayering for variety or as the season shifts. Discovering that time and energy are more important even than cash, so
take
cabs if you have to and don't feel guilty about it. Delegate tasks wherever you can, unlearn shame at depending on people if they truly offer, and don't feel guilty about that. It's a strange weightlessness that I've only ever experienced before while in jail, where you're stripped of your material possessions but realize they can never strip you of yourself. There's a discovery, an elation in that, which is difficult to explain, even to Iliana.

It's also a heady sensation to feel so amazingly, undeservedly
loved
. By women friends and by less-close women acquaintances. By all the gestures of consideration, affection, generosity. The net that I and hundreds of other women have been weaving together for decades actually is now being stretched out by their hands to support
me
.

Those are the good days, anyway. I cherish them. There is, to be sure, a flip side. Like the pure fatigue and despair when
it
hits, from the tiniest details like last month wanting my warm gloves for the sudden cold snap—except that I'd left them all the way up in Riverdale at Korynne's in a box of winter stuff she's storing for me and how in hell could I disturb her for a pair of gloves but it was cold and I hadn't the money to buy another pair and my hands couldn't just be shoved into my pockets because I'm carrying things all the time so then I decided I better just put it out of my mind and have cold hands. Or how the shoulders ache from simply
carrying
everything all the time—the clothes one is sick to death of re-wearing, the file folders (labeled General To Do, Phone Calls, Urgent Mail, Hope Medical, Hope Co-op, Hope Insurance, Hope Stock Tangle, Hope Legal, Hope Bills, Laurence Bills, Hope Nursing Homes, Hope Furnishings Sale, Outstanding J.T. Loans, Upcoming Lecture Notes, Athena Memos, Book Chapter). I have so many lists that I now have lists of lists. I cart around more books than the inventory of that tiny Yonkers library I went to as a kid. Then there's how it feels to mentally run one's fingers over the loved features of well-worn possessions in rooms where one no longer lives but where part of oneself remains alert and waiting: that particular book, right now, when I need it for a reference; that particular third dresser drawer that always stuck and squeaked in a friendly manner; the fifth cut on that particular recording; the glazed plum pottery mug that meant comfort just to hold no matter what warmth filled it. But the worst of it isn't material or physical. It's the gradually accumulating prostration of saying thank you to well-meaning friends. It's the suspicion that one might have overstayed one's limit, pushed beyond unspoken boundaries, begun to be perceived as a soap-opera character; that one has somehow “asked for this” by one's galloping neuroses, that one might begin to be viewed as A Problem.

Still, there are lessons emerging in what Charlotte has termed “all this sleeping around without sleeping around.” Things you learn about others: the ways they really live their lives, the small specifics—how they arrange their homes, kitchens, books; what they're obsessively clean about and what they leave dirty, which articles they really use and which merely exhibit, how their private space differs from their public personae—tiny, touching, infinitely tender details that teach compassion about the peculiar species called human. Leonora, for instance, loves soul music but loathes soul food; she's a closet vegetarian. At Charlotte and Zach's, all
her
cosmetics and contact-lens cooker and other toiletries are crammed onto half a bathroom shelf—while
his
electric shaver occupies the other half in solitary splendor. Karen's Manhattan pied-a-terre is resplendent with petit-point cushion covers she herself has made—the way, she confesses, that she keeps herself sane much less awake while listening to her stultifying colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives. Marie, who's a superb cook, has always longed for a garlic press and a good cleaver, but thought them self-indulgent; she jumped up and down with delight when she found I'd bought them for her.
Nobody
remembers to water their plants; consequently I'm getting a reputation for being a green-thumb genius.

But I
want
to be of use, to give back not just in gratitude but (how strange to feel this under these circumstances!) in
celebration
. Such a rare privilege of glimpsing all this intimacy can develop the eye, can teach one what one likes or abhors (and didn't even know one liked or abhorred), can sensitize the vital capacity to
notice
.

Even more crucial are the lessons I begin to see are there for learning about myself. Because in this situation, after a while, anyway, the skillful tantrums don't work, the shaking of the Promethean fist. All one's fine words about existential risk not only come home to roost but lay (rotten) eggs in one's face. Patience has to be—finally—engaged and wrestled with, and patience is not some shy Griselda sitting dumbly at her spinning wheel. Patience is Cerberus at the gates of hell, wrath held in inertia only by the force of awe, a giving when one feels one has nothing left to give, a waiting that is atomic in its motion, an active stillness. I thought I'd already learned patience. But patience, I begin to see, isn't so easily seduced. I find I keep mistaking patience for mere depression, despair, or indifference. Authentic patience, when I do glimpse it, is for me accompanied by certain characteristics—humor being the chief one.

The lesson of absurdity is central. A sense of the ludicrous, the ironic, a
positive
value in the surreal—how that dwarfs the other sense of injustice, malevolence!

I mean, it
is
side-splittingly incongruous to find yourself pulling up to the lawyers' offices in the momentary luxury of Edith's husband's chauffeur-driven free limo, from which you emerge complete with briefcase, handbag, backpack, and two paper shopping bags. Then you proceed on in to meet for an hour with two attorneys who explain that your mother is a pauper but cannot claim indigence or Medicare because she legally owns a Sutton Place co-op and besides she's in trouble with the IRS for three years of unfiled tax returns. Then they discreetly inquire why you never sued her for your childhood earnings and you remind them that the “Jackie Coogan law” came into effect in New York State fairly late and though you could have slid in under the statute of limitations it was difficult to stomach the idea of hauling your mother into court. Then you ask if you might use their phone to make a few local calls. You call Laurence, who shouts that you have vast power, influence, and support-systems, and since he has none he is the proletariat. You call Charlotte to apologize that you'll be late on tomorrow's editing delivery. You call Iliana to find out if the Oklahoma State Women's College check got forwarded
yet
. You call your bank, to say you realize you're overdrawn but there's a deposit in the mail to cover that (a lie). You call the Happy Sunset Home Admissions Office, to confirm that you'll be coming by tomorrow. Then you reassure the lawyers that they'll be paid their fee as soon as the co-op is sold, and you express repeated gratitude for their forbearance. Then you give them one of the shopping bags, containing the latest batch of Hope's gradually-being-sorted papers. Then you scrunch yourself into the subway to be lurched to Georgi's, where you are now staying again because it's the most centrally located and you have a room to yourself there, which she has by now named “The Julian Travis Memorial Den.” On the subway, your brain won't stop buzzing. By this time, you are a composite of even more selves than Virginia Woolf's Orlando on her way home at the end of the book. But
you
don't
have
a home. Later, in the middle of the night, you get up to go to the bathroom but being groggily half-asleep turn right instead of left and bash your face on the wall. Georgi's bathroom is to the left; it's Charlotte's that's to the right.

If this isn't farce then I have forgotten my Marx Brothers—Harpo, Groucho, Chico, Zeppo, and Karl.

What a blessed respite humor provides! Perspective, dimension, balance,
mercy
(for one's self as well as others)! How the “If-onlys …” and the “I-never-should-haves …” melt away until they sound like distant mumblings of a megalomaniacal mind babbling to itself (like Doris Lessing's “I I I …” in
The Golden Notebook
), babbling out into massively shifting patterns of some profound galactic brain which has far better things about which to think.

Best of all, the humor and patience give courage, too. Not “strength,”
courage
. I'm getting awfully sick of strength. A wall can be strong; so can some hulk pumping iron, a slave, a dictator, a torturer, a rapist, a mule. Courage, on the other hand, requires intelligent
attention
, which can't coexist comfortably with depression or despair. It has more to do with humility and buoyancy.

I begin to sense that all the places my trajectory now transits are rich with wisdom, mine for the finding. It's up to me to learn how to use this creatively. I sense, too, that the anguish recedes in direct proportion to the creative use I can make of it.

May 23, 1983

Still at Georgi's. Still playing to mixed notices:

—Hospital situation remains largely the same, though she has flickers of acknowledgment for me lately. I was spooning her some ice cream today, thought she didn't want anymore, and started to take away the remains. Suddenly she drawled imperiously, “Mbaby!” and opened her mouth as a sign she wanted more. I thought my heart would burst. Dr. Grimes is holding to his promise of trying to keep her there until a nursing home manifests itself, despite her not being an emergency anymore. Then again, he says that the cough she's developed bears close watching: the old threat of pneumonia.

—Nursing-home situation still unresolved. Iliana and I have endured seeing eleven so far: hell-hole after hell-hole. Still another four to go on the “preferred list.” There
must
be a tolerable one in all of New York City. What this society does to old people is unspeakable. Charlotte's droll comment that we ought to be thinking about creating an Old Feminists' Home should be taken in dead earnest.

—Co-op situation improving. The apartment is finally emptied: trashed, sold, or in storage. The floor sanders have finished, the painters started today. It's already being shown to prospective buyers, with instructions to the agent that speed, not the highest price, is the priority.

—Legal situation proceeding.
Ugly
. The lawyers have had me declared Hope's guardian and conservator. The formalities involved depositions from her doctors and a hospital visit from the court-appointed expert, these atrocities to save her from a worse one, a competency hearing. I fought the entire competency approach. It had me vomiting for two days (that was at Marie's, I think), but apparently there was no other way to formalize my authority to sell the co-op. When the court expert asked her what date it was, she stammered furiously that she wasn't crazy or a child and that they both knew damned well it was September 15, 1938. (What happened to her on that day, I wonder?)

—Money situation grave. I'm still trying to juggle her bills (for which I may or may not be able to partly reimburse myself after the co-op sale, depending on how much it brings). I'm also still supporting the loft, though that does begin to feel masochistic. I know Iliana despairs of me for this lunacy. But I really don't see what else I can do.

—Travel situation beginning to get me down. Thank god the weather's warmer, but I've still got a low-grade fever hanging on from the cold I caught in Canada. Squeezed in three more speaking dates in the past weeks. Have to accept as many as possible, and sandwich in the Athena editing on planes, in motels, in airport waitingrooms.

—No movement on the Laurence front. Sullenness alternates with tears, hints of tenderness (from both of us) with viciousness (from both of us). Mostly the cruel freeze of “civility.” Stasis. Numbness.

—Timing front formidable. In the next month it all has to mesh like clockwork or the whole thing will fall apart: nursing home to be found and, since they won't hold open a vacancy for more than a week, co-op must be sold by then so as to
pay
for nursing home. Both must happen before Grimes can no longer stall discharging her from the hospital into nowhere. Lawyers will not handle tax problem without being paid up in total for their work thus far. Co-op sale mustn't be
so
cheaply sacrificial for the sake of speed (but then again it must be); there has to be enough money for her mounting legal and medical bills as well as to keep her for as long as necessary in a home. And I've
got
to be able to reimburse myself for at least a few hundred bucks or else the June loft rent can't get paid.