On Keeping Women (2 page)

It would seem odd that he hadn’t. I’ve the same large hazel eyes, not glassy, but clear. You could drop a pebble, I’ve been told, and never find it. Neither would I. The same surprised eyebrows, the nose just as pudgy and inquiring, though on a girl it might be appealing. The mouth maybe more bowed. Looking in the mirror, the mouth was the only part that gave me hope. It looked as if it might yet spit that pebble out.

But water was my sure element. Why else am I lying here instead of picking myself up and titupping home like a good householder with a bun on, a wee drunkie mother, but one with good family intentions of baking guiltbread all the next day? No intention of sliding down in though, nostrils open and weed-hair dragging. I want to float on, out of the dream-tangle, maybe even rowing hard at the end.

What was bothering me that night—well, watch out here, Lexie. Take care not to re-interpret your old girlish life according to modern intentions. The way biographers will push Freud right through the brain of some poor emperor or poet or mass-murderer—or Sappho or President Taft or P. T. Barnum—born too soon ever to have heard of him.

But it is true that Father was always vaguer about my opportunities. And that night I was feeling it.

“Father. What’s the city going to do for
me
?”

That mouth of ours opposite me fell open. At the heresy. “Why, Girlbud!”

I’m sorry to report this, but that is what he said. His mother was a Southerner.

“Why, Girlbud… don’t you know?”

He meant that if my response to the city wasn’t already so granulated into my flesh that it would take one of his industrial processes to part us, then he had failed me. Or I him. Though to be fair, he never thought of himself as failed toward. The companies had taken care of that.

“Yeah, I know,” I say sullenly, through hair I’d taken to wearing like a veil. “But what am I going to do with it?” With which I close my eyes, pull my veil further over my nose and lean my head on one palm.

I’d known what New York was to me ever since I was nine or so, when a bus seat had lent a manipulative hand while I was staring up at a skyscraper, and. I’d immediately made poetry of the matter. I’d’ve known even younger if I’d been allowed to ride buses by myself sooner. For such an occasion, one has to be alone. And perhaps it wasn’t a skyscraper—or even the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which in those days my bus from school passed often. Maybe it was only some tenement with the late light on it, or a misty patch of Hudson afternoon, or a square of that violet-glass sidewalk which looked like some semi-precious stone you were going to be able to wear. Or maybe the pier. More likely, it was all of those together, and then some. For I’d known for some time now that the city could melt me physically, to a yearning I had no words for, no comparisons.

But I have now. Oh water, wheel past me, Hudsoning by me and through me to that seat of my sensations. Weeds and rushes, fringe my face, while I lie here and laugh. While the harbor is mo-oaning. The city’s a certain kind of zone for me—not the deepest of our lot maybe, but often the truest. New York to me—and maybe Paris and Hong Kong too; the list of world capitals dizzies me if I think too much on it—to me a city itself is an erogenous zone.

One of mine in fact. Father’d done his work too blindly. My body, sleepily arising to whatever objects presented it in the new dark of sensation, had engorged too well. And could Father now tell me what to do with that condition. I found I didn’t want him to. Let me hoard it, and hide.

“Why honey,” he said. “You’ll be like your mother. I hope.”

And I saw he really did.

James and I sideglanced each other. James often gave me those brotherly comforts. Without further advice. He was embarrassed just then to be a brother, I think. Being further on with women than we knew. And with women who were further on.

“Like Mother?” I said. “Why’s she’s a—a parasite.”

“A—a what?” Father said. But I could see the idea intrigued. Mother—with her forty-five-hour-week bunions, and those meals—made out of thousands of boxes maybe, but by her. Mother—with her pulled-crepe-paper hair, which went to the tongs for help only if a caseworker’s convention needed her, along with her gray, socially justified sweaters and skirts.

“Yes, a parasite. Who happens to work.”

On the way home, we three were silent. With my usual talent for missing the true target, I was angry at James. For encouraging me to go too far, and leaving me to cope with the results.

Father shared that talent, also. “I don’t know—” he sighed. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with your
mind.”

Late that night, when the others were bedded down, I get up again, and take the body that inhabits my mind back to the Morton Street pier. By then it’s late for cruisers, but beginning for lovers, mostly gay. Drizzling a little. And no sign of the whores I’m looking for. I know a few by sight but have never spoken to one. For a while, I can’t think of anything except the family anyway. James, on the daybed in the dining room, rolling to a city noise now and then, sometimes onto the floor. Father, dead to the world in his twinbed, wearing the singlet that is cool to his psoriasis. Mother in her twinbed, sleeping the sleep of the just, in pajamas with feet. Because of being a girl, I had a room alone, and the old double-bed they’d been married in. That ought to tell me something.

Until our policeman on the beat comes by—he knows us, but he’ll surely chase me—I have so little time. He himself must have the very information I want—not that he’ll give it. And I need the female view of it.

Shortly—it’s raining by now—Mother comes down the block to give me hers. She slips her arm in mine confidingly, the same as she sometimes does when she sneaks into my bed, a refugee from Father’s snore. I turn my back on her, the way I always do. And then turn round again, as usual.

“Anything I can do to help?” she says.

That’s kind of her. But I wonder why she thinks any woman with pajamas stuffed in galoshes, and a man’s lumberjack covering her dropseat, has advice I can use.

“The city disturbs me.” I know that in the end I’ll tell her how. But nothing ever got past her language—certainly not her emotions. And that would be that, I thought.

I was wrong.

“Dad told me what you said.” She sighs. “He’s so vulnerable.”

“He
is.” I flip back my hair. “Huh.”

That interested her. She studied gesture. “You mean you are? And you’re denying that quality in him?”

I flip my hair forward, wetting my nose. “Maybe. I meant—you’re the masochist.”

“Those puddings!” she says at once. “You’re right. Nobody needs dessert.”

I put my arms up, and shriek a little.

The cop on the beat passes, eyeing us. Yeah, he knows us; he’s the one referred James to the morgue. “Now, girls—” he says, shaking his head. “Now girls.” He didn’t like fights.

“See—you stopped the rain,” Mother says to me, soothing. And giving him the high sign to leave us be. “But you got it twisted about me, lady … I’m a worker. Who happens to be a parasite.” She stashed her hands on her hips. “Why else do you suppose I’m a radical?”

Lying here in the weeds—there are stars up there now—it’s my firm conviction that life teaches everybody to be humorous about at least one thing. If so, it came to her and me late.

“You suppose I could ask Officer Maraglia?” I say. “How to be a prostitute? A streetwalker, I mean.” What joy—to walk these streets.

She looks over to where he’s disappearing, before she answers me. “Or a callgirl, maybe? Your arches are weak.”

But then she feels my forehead, my cheeks. Draws me to her by the wrists, kisses one of them. And sits down so hard on a wooden piling that I fall into her lap. I can’t stay there. She can’t stay on the piling. We both stand up.

“Wait a minute—” I say. One side of her dropseat’s been snagged open by the piling. I button her up again. “You suppose
they
have little dropseats, sort of out front? Or is that a vulgar thought?”

She stares at the harbor. “I warned Charlie. That you were already over-prepared.”

James comes up just then. I know he’s fond of me, though he’ll never let on. Still won’t. “Schizophrenia?” he says. “Often starts at fifteen.”

“Seventeen,” Mother says, turning on me. “And lay off her. I’m the caseworker here.”

My father comes down the pier, scratching. He’s wearing my mother’s green Loden cape. “Beautiful night, isn’t it. I couldn’t sleep either.” He moons at the river as if he’s forgotten he’ll be crossing it again, come daylight. But he’s heard her. “Come on, Renata, give it a rest. Give Lexie here.”

As if it isn’t him who always harangues.

James and I sideswipe glances again. We’re decently dressed, for us. For the hour, even formally. With parents like ours, we do what we can to restore the balance. Not that it works.

I address them all. “Mother has her clients. And you have the plant. Plants.” (I couldn’t pluralize those now; he
was
vulnerable.) “And you both have James and me.” (I wouldn’t call that an advantage now, either. But for my short hour, I was relentless.) “And James has the morgue. What have
I
got?” I see Father open the mouth I’m already afraid is mine too. “And if you ever call me Girlbud again, I’ll positively leave.”

“She wants a vocation, Charlie,” Mother says. “But she doesn’t know what.”

I gnaw my lip, betrayed. And betray back, quick as I can. “I do so know. I’m not him.”

James’s eyes widen. “Do you, Sis. You never said.”

I couldn’t. There are technical words for sense-confusion; I know that now. And many avenues to it. Music that confuses us with pictures, of a kind the composer never planned. Odors with a little hush to them. Gin that makes Bach smell like flowers. My son, at six, said “Wednesday is pink.”

“The city—” I wanted to say to them. “That you have burdened me with. No—trusted me with, too soon. Like jewels I’m to inherit but haven’t yet. I want the city, between my thighs.”

“Want to study medicine too?” Mother says. “Maybe we could stake you.” Her tone’s as false as her puddings. “When it comes time.”

“Sibling jealousy?” Father shakes his head, doubting; he’s the one who spends time with us. “No—I don’t think.”

How smart they think they are, James signals me. About each other. And never see themselves. Or us.

“No, I don’t want,” I say violently. “I
hate
horses.”

Mother trembles. She feels professionally close to madness in others, but doesn’t want it in the family. “Overstimulated, see? And two years away from college yet. We’ll have to organize.”

The policeman drifts over. Maybe he’s never been sure of us completely. A family who’ll stand on a pier at four in the morning, discussing its business …
Outré,
yes? And no doubt responsible for the way I can lie up here now, at almost the same hour, calmly discussing my life—with my life…

“Organize?” the cop says, addressing James as the most decently clothed. “Who’s organizing what?”

“We are,” James says, pointing. “Her.”

So that’s how, as soon as school is out that summer and next, I go to study to be a medical secretary. And never get to college at all. As Mother says, “James’ll be bringing plenty of interns home.”

As Father says the day I marry one, “You women never look farther than your nose.”

This is in reference to the foreign tour he’d briefly spirited me away on to persuade me otherwise, the minute I’d announced my intentions. He’d aimed for Canada, but the hired car had failed us—and perhaps the money too. “Will you just look at the world!” he’d said to me from a window of the Hotel Oswego in Cooperstown, New York. “Look. Look!”

Let them fade now as parents do, into the ruins but still alive. Mother at sixty still repairing the city volunteer—all the way from the Gulf. Father leaving the city altogether—like people who so love cats, but desert them—to follow his nose into retirement with a richer wife—her nightgowns being especially luxe.

James’s imagination, bachelor again after two tries, has proved most durable. Often after he’s been up the river for the weekend with us, and is off for the city again, he’ll whisper something to me, while brother-in-law Raymond kindly goes to extricate James’s car from those others which on Sunday afternoons are often pulled up on the various front lawns of the houses along the road here, like lines of shoats. James’s sibling eye is meanwhile casting a small judgment on me—a large woman—like those tiny, flat metal stampings of the Statue of Liberty the class used to be sent home with, after toiling up her inner staircase to look out at her spikes. His wicked diagnosis tickles my ear. “Honorable sister,” his voice says. “Float down the river to me any day suits you. Only, not as a corpse.” A city judgment.

So here I am—as organized.

When I married Raymond, the tallest, palest (with effort) and most careful of the interns James brought home, the “Dr.” had just been attached to him: two perfect initials which swing from him, and sound as he walks. And are never lost. Later on I gave him a matched tiepin and cufflinks of those same initials, which he wears proudly still. Doctors love simple jokes, the grim dears, and in return for the life they lead, a wife whose jokes are not the same may still cooperate. Sometimes when I lay with him, looking deeply into his chest hairs, a few of these would whorl themselves into those same initials, pair upon pair. And until the finalities that brought me here, there was a pattern of moles on his windpipe that my mind’s eye was working on.

A blameless man; try as I may, no blame will ever attach to him. Or to his parents. The basement of their house as I first saw it remains the most finished basement in America. With outlines drawn on the floor—garden-shears to roto-cutters, to ladders and floor-sanders—in which all implements are placed. The ladders being alumi
num
without the added “i”; theirs is a household local to the very end. Which end may be those milkcans Ray’s mother paints black with bald eagles on them—which no longer hold milk. Around the cellar walls, trunks from another generation stand rigid with non-travel. “A hysterical basement,” I report to James, after the engagement visit. “Someday those empty trunks will explode.”