Emma Who Saved My Life (56 page)

“Hey Gil, it's a bit late, I—”

Lisa, just for one night, the sofa. It's an emergency. I synopsized the Emma pills story.

“Right sure…” Jim came out and was strained but cordial. I got shown the sofa. Lights got turned off, doors closed, their West Side apartment was quiet except for the air-conditioner hum. Great, I'm saying to myself, not able to sleep. Here you are imposing on Lisa and you haven't seen her in six months—it's not as if she's your close friend anymore. Why should the Gil and Emma show break in on Jim and Lisa's quiet evening? Then I hear them discussing something rather loudly from the bedroom. Arguing over me, I guess. No. Something more substantial. I put my head under the oblong sofa pillow. I can still hear them. I see why they were so strained; they'd been having a fight. Ooops. There goes the baby, bawling away. Great. I try to figure out the date.

Final Report, September 3, 1981: Gil's Official Low Point in his New York Years. Lisa would ask me to stay that week until I found another place and in that time Jim and she would have three major fights. Where was it that people loved each other and it worked out right and everyone was happy? What had happened to all our good times?

I knew one thing for sure. That was it for Emma. My life had had enough of that woman. Yes it had had its moments, it had been fun—for maybe four out of nearly eight years—but I'm going to start looking for a higher percentage. And a new career and a new agent. And a new apartment, and maybe a new girlfriend. So there it was, decided for eternity on the sofa in Jim and Lisa's West Side apartment: no more Emma, the conclusion of the friendship. I felt better already for the decision. And I meant it too. Emma, you're never going to see me again.

1982

“IT'S right in the brown satchel there, under this bed,” Emma said, giving directions. I fetched it for her and she rummaged through it: “I should show you this poem first … no, wait, maybe not…”

When does this poetry book of yours come out?

“It'll take about six weeks to get it printed up, the woman said. I want the Women's Consortium Press to print a second edition so
everyone
I know has to buy fifty copies, I'll reimburse you for your raid on the bookshops.” Emma found a tattered envelope and passed it over for my inspection. “That's my letter of acceptance. The editor is a friend of Janet's.”

Small world.

“Not that that had
anything
to do with anything,” she winked.

One good thing about your being here, I said (trying to be Mr. Cheery), is that you have plenty of time to write.

Emma was electric, as enthusiastic as I'd seen her in years, excited about all her literary projects—at last a book of poems was to be published. She held forth, as in days of old, about writing, about how little the later twentieth-century American had to say, how she wished she were from the third world, how she was limited by being terminally bourgeois:

“I'm handicapped, let's face it—I'm a martyr to the American middle class,” Emma said, falling back convinced into her pillow. “Proust had Paris to contrast with the provincial life—think of Dickens's London or James's international salon set or Mark Twain or Fitzgerald—I mean, they had backdrops, they had lives and times to write about. Now how can I touch that?”

Well, you can write about anything if you write about it well enough (… I said, sounding like someone's mother).

“Indianapolis? Brownies in second grade? Cruising the Food Fair with Gilda Hoad hoping to see fourteen-year-old Tracy Stanbrook who worked as a checkout bagboy on Tuesdays and Thursdays? My Monkees lunchbox? This is my life, my memoirs, middle-class Indiana. It's hopeless, Gil.”

Maybe you can write about it and make everybody laugh.

Emma nodded blankly. “You're missing my point. There's no beauty, there's nothing of lasting interest in my childhood or … the rest of my crappy life. I'm thinking of papier-mache palm trees at the prom—the theme was South Pacific Night: Some Enchanted Evening. I'm thinking dance classes at Mrs. DeVon's School of Ballroom Dancing and her annual recital where I was a Dancing Daisy. I'm talking about the sheer mediocrity of my life. If I were black I'd have something to write about. I don't have anything to write about.”

We're not living in uninteresting times, I said.

Emma considered this, falling quiet for the first time since my visit began. Then, as if to fill the silence, she laughed. “Do you remember our toys? Our wonderful '60s toys we grew up with?”

The Golden Age of Toys was the '60s.

“Did you know I had a Little Miss Kitchen EZ-Bake Oven?”

God, Nancy Brooks next door had one of those. You could make cakes the size of a chocolate chip cookie.

“They tasted like dirt. They were shit I think. I mean, really, they put excrement in those little cake packages, I'm sure of it. It wasn't a real oven—I guess they were worried little girls would burn down the house or something. It was this quick drying excrement you poured in the cake tin and then you put it inside this ovenlike chamber … oh god, my set came with a little apron, a little frilly apron. Get those girls in the kitchen early, mothers!”

I had an Etch-a-Sketch. And I had at some point a Close-and-Play record player. It's amazing any record survived the plastic technology. Remember gyroscopes, all those pseudospace-age toys.

“Barbies. I had lesbian relations with Barbie—I loved Barbie. When my breasts came in looking like normal breasts and not Barbie's breasts I was convinced I was a freak. Mind you, Barbie peaked after I outgrew her, when I was in high school. My little sister got Skipper and Francie and there was a black doll … Darn, who was that? Oh and
Ken,
the Ken doll without the penis. My little sister had the…” Emma broke off giggling. “Oh god, the Barbie VAN. The hippie van, Gil. The LUV VAN with decals of flowers you could peel and stick on. MOD Barbie with the miniskirts and go-go boots!”

Confess, confess—did Emma have a pair of white go-go boots?

After initial denials, a guilty nod. “Yes. Yes, when I was twelve. I would dance in my room with Gilda Hoad next door and we both pretended we were Diana Ross and we'd fight over who got to be the Supremes—doing STOP in the name of love with the gestures. We had white go-go boots. Oh god, do you remember
American Bandstand? Hullabaloo? Shindig!
I never missed those shows. I'd close the den door and dance dance dance—the Swim, the Frug, the Monkey, they had a new dance each week. And once I had a slumber party and there was a
Bandstand
with Herman's Hermits, Peter Noone with all those teeth … ‘Missuz Brown you've goht uh lufflay daught'uh…'”

Great Cockney, Emma.

“I can do the ‘Enery the Eighth' song too—or was that Paul Revere and the Raiders? Anyway, my slumber party got to screaming and yelling like girls did for the Beatles, carrying on so that my father marched in and told us the party was over, young lady, if we couldn't behave ourselves—I was SO embarrassed, thought I would
die.
”

Remember the Pony?

“Honey, I do a MEAN Pony to this day. Oh wow. Well okay that part of growing up was good—but that's nostalgia, not the makings of great art. What did boys get?” Emma straightened herself in the bed, eyeing the clock, waiting for the nurse.

Chemistry sets, I said. I discovered one hundred ways to mix things together to produce a smell indistinguishable from a fart. And of course GI Joes. The great Korea-through-Vietnam-era toy.

“Dolls for boys, in a way,” Emma said.

Very macho dolls. GI Joe came with machine guns, tanks, jeeps, a variety of outfits, the real-live-working-plastic bazooka. Tommy Meepers next door to me in Oak Park had a GI Joe too and our GI Joes often went on group tactical military missions—

“How did GI Joes talk to each other, as they were all named Joe?”

How did Barbies?

“Hadn't thought of that. Kids can get around anything, huh?”

Tommy Meepers and I loved to climb trees and we climbed up the tree in the Meeperses' front yard and made parachutes out of a handkerchief and string and we'd throw our GI Joes out of the tree and watch them float to the ground, except they never floated to the ground, they just broke and got their chutes tangled up in the lower branches, hanging there for days.

“Just like Vietnam—realistic games are good for kids.”

My younger brother, I said, chewed on my GI Joe and I eventually stopped playing with it. GI Joe also terrorized neighborhood Barbies.

“My sister had better toys than I did, and I secretly, even in high school, wanted to play with them. Remember Creepy Crawlers?”

I remembered Creepy Crawlers—boy did I ever. You weren't a child unless you once threw up from overeating those Creepy Crawlers. There were the kind that were plastic, but there were also the edible ones. You poured goo into a mold—a spider, a snake, a scorpion, whatever—then you put the mold in this press and created your own Creepy Crawler which you could put on the squealing girl's desk at school or down her dress or in her face or somewhere like that.

“Oh god,
games.
Do you remember how many games there were? Did you ever play Twister in high school? That was right up there with spin-the-bottle for social bravery.” Twister was where you spun a spinner-thing and a colored dot came up and you had to put your hand or foot there on this big dotted sheet that took up the whole room, and you invariably ended up in some impossible position with your face in some girl's breasts or some guy's crotch as you tried to touch all the assigned spots you had to touch.

It was the Golden Age of Saturday Cartoons too.

“Yeah that's the damn truth. I watched cartoons last Saturday as I was so bored here in the hospital—pathetic. All this Scooby-Doo shit, all this young kids solving mysteries and finding ghosts or going to outer space. Trash, cheaply made too. What happened to Tom and Jerry, the Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Heckle and Jeckle, all the violent cartoons where animals got accordioned and MASHED into pancakes and boulders fell on them and there were trapdoors and live wires and DEATH around every corner. God, that stuff prepared me for real life. That wasn't entertainment, that was a complex moral philosophy: You want to eat the tweety-bird, then you have to get steamrollered for it, go over cliffs. It was better to make friends.”

It was the Golden Age of situation TV comedies.

“Andy Griffith, Dick van Dyke,
Leave It to Beaver
—pure fantasy America. The whole country modeled their families on this junk—twin single beds in our parents' bedrooms! Mother always in an apron.
What
do people see in TV nowadays? There's not a decent thing on now. Gross kids and gross families and sappy moral lessons and
applause
at everything, these live studio audiences killed quality TV. Geez, what I wouldn't give for the days of canned audiences who were given appropriate responses. Life should have a laugh track, too.”

There was a stirring outside in the hall, the nurse's voice.

“Oh god, here she comes, Nurse Ratchett in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
I'm waiting for Simon Wiesenthal to catch up to her…”

The nurse was complaining about something loudly in the hall, to an underling perhaps.

“I wonder how many she's killed. Like those nurse-murderers in Ohio that were knocking off patients for fun. In another century she'd have been burned as a witch. These state hospitals skim the bottom of the barrel for staff, that's for sure—”

Quiet Emma, really. Here she comes.

“Visiting hours are over at three young man,” the nurse snarled.

Yes ma'am. (Whoa, she
was
hideous.)

“Here's your pill,” said the nurse, taking Emma's wrist in her beefy, truck-driver's hand. “You're fine, just fine,” she said, not taking a full measure. “I'm going to watch you take your pill now.”

Emma reached uneasily for her water glass and took her pill, trying not to seem nervous or anxious. But she had been fidgeting for this particular pill ever since I'd arrived. She took it and sank back into the pillow, closing her eyes.

The nurse left, grumbling a reminder about three o'clock, she would be back with another pill, she didn't want to still find me here, people think they can just break the rules and they can't, three o'clock is it, and then it's time to go, rules are rules …

“The woman should be a guard in a women's correctional institution,” said Emma, breathing deeply. “They've really got me going now. I can't tell if this is a placebo or a real downer. The body relaxes in any event. There'll come a time when, I hope, I'll be taking all placebos—the worst of it, last week, I mean, is over. It won't get that bad again. I think.”

I had nothing to say for a moment. Eventually, I said, I hope you'll tell me how you ended up in Bellevue in the first place. Why not stay in a regular hospital—

“Aw c'mon, let's not … let's not go into that now. I'll tell you … in a minute, I guess. Like my Christmas lights?”

Janet had brought in and strung up this cheap $2 pack of colored lights around the window, the unopenable window with a metal beam through it, since there were suicides on this ward. Emma pointed out two get-well cards, one from Mandy one from someone at work; the flowers were from Dina. After I'd left, Dina moved in. Dina was a nagging whimpering secretary at Emma's PR firm—part of this double act, I mentioned earlier, with this woman named Joanna who came over to the house and listened to Emma's ramblings, cosseting her every neurosis. They were Crisis Junkies. Their own lives were dull so they enjoyed watching Emma's lurch up and down—I always suspected they waited for disasters like this to strike, hoping for them at some level. I imagine Dina on the phone: “Yes, it
was
good I was there … yes, I did save the day. No don't call me a hero, I have a duty to Emma…” If I'm caustic about these women, perhaps it is because at one time I could have been accused of the same thing: nobly cleaning up after Emma's messes and not giving her the kick in the behind she needed. Well, it hardly mattered now. We were out of each other's lives. She could have her Dinas and Joannas.