Braided Lives (26 page)

“Michael, why don’t you bring us iced tea?”

A warning look from him. They want to catch me alone. “Anything else to drink?”

“I believe Sue Ellen made a pitcher of lemonade. But bring the tea for your aunt and myself.”

“Sue Ellen?” I ask.

“The maid.” He rises with exaggerated fatigue. “Come on, you can carry the glasses.”

“Your guests don’t want to run errands,” his mother says but I hasten after. Mike has hardly any clothes, yet he does not work and they have a maid. The kitchen is stuffed with twenty-year-old appliances my mother would pity. The refrigerator is half empty, nothing to tempt noshing. “Mike, what does the maid
do?
Is she pretty?”

“She’s fifty, coal black and big as a house.” Against the refrigerator door he kisses me roughly, asserting something.

Instead of just filling glasses, serving is complicated. “Mike as head of household will pour,” Mrs. Loesser says crisply.

He serves his aunt first but she frowns. “All that time in the kitchen and you forgot my lemon?”

“Sorry.” Chin lowered he strides out and back. Then without looking up he sloshes tea into glasses and passes them out.

“Isn’t it stifling? Aren’t you glad you don’t have to teach in this weather, Ban?” his mother says.

I ask, “What do you teach?”

“General science,” Mike answers, giving her his best smile. “Any good snakes this year, Ban?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, I have a lovely blue racer. Would you like it for the summer?”

“Ban! You know Michael. Don’t tempt him. All his life he’s brought home strays. All manner of lost creatures from heaven knows where.” The small pursed smile does not change.

What can I do but pretend I do not understand?

His mother’s hands are braced over the ends of the wicker chair arms. Her gaze moves leisurely off my shoes to my face. My old winter flats. I have to fight the impulse to tuck my feet under the settee. “You’re attending the university also?”

“Yes. I’ll be a sophomore in the fall.”

Aunt Ban smiles faintly. “Are you planning to do anything in particular?”

“I write.”

“So many young people seem to want to be authors,” she says dryly. “What do you intend to write about?”

Mike’s mother says gently, “Ban, I’m sure growing up in a rooming house, one must encounter many unusual situations.”

“I didn’t grow up in a rooming house, Mrs. Loesser. Perhaps you’re thinking of Thomas Wolfe?”

“I’m sorry. That must be another friend of Michael’s. It would be an awkward position for a young girl.” She sips her tea. “We had hoped to send Michael to a good Eastern school for his last two years …”

Aunt Ban nods brisk agreement.

“… but I suppose that will have to wait for graduate school.”

“You’ve years of schooling ahead of you, boy,” Aunt Ban says with fierce good humor. “A long hard pull. You must apply yourself. This last semester’s grades disappointed us….”

His fingers strum his knees as he looks from one to the other with the expression of an alert and earnest boy.

Aunt Ban nods at the table where his leather binder lies. “How’s the Proust going?”

“What?”

“Didn’t you tell me you were going to read Proust in the original this summer?”

His voice is mild as when he is most angry. I suddenly understand that is what his mother does. “I admit it sounds like the sort of thing I’m apt to say.” He gets up. “I’ll put a record on.”

“It’s late, Michael,” his mother says. “Sounds carry with the windows open. Perhaps you’ve lost perspective, you’ve been keeping such late hours.”

He paces around the porch once, twice, then stoops to pull a violin from under the settee.

“Michael, did you take that out here again? The damp air will warp it.”

“I was practicing.” Tucking it under his chin, he runs the bow over the squawking strings. “This was my father’s but I began learning on it when I was five. I caught on quickly and they thought I’d be a prodigy. But I petered out.”

“Michael!” His mother shakes her head. “No one wanted you to be a prodigy, of all things. You hated to practice. Your father never intended for you to be anything but a doctor.”

The bow chafes in agony against the strings. His eyes glow dark. “I remember differently.”

“Prodigy!” She clicks her tongue, smiling with real amusement. “Then play if you like. If it wouldn’t bore your friend.”

“It’s too damned hot.” Picking up the case roughly he takes the violin into the house. A moment later, a drawer slams. The gazes of the two women meet in amused tolerance, and at that moment I quite hate them.

July 10, 1954

Dear Stu,

Somehow I haven’t had the energy to answer. The less I do, the less I can do. Like oversleeping and waking up exhausted. I write Lennie every night. We keep in touch that way if you can call it touch—but oh the frustration!

I found a cruddy job as receptionist in a dental building. I swear I’ll never waste a summer this way again. How dependent we are on a few lousy dollars—all the difference between freedom and compulsion!

I’ve been reading Colette (in translation but don’t tell Julie if you see her) and C. Wright Mills. I realized I had decided to be an art historian because of Lennie. My own interests lie more in the direction of sociology, as you’ve said yourself indirectly. I feel very class conscious, fascinated by interactions of people and groups. I think I may major in soc. What think you?

You don’t know how lucky you are to be with Mike, able to act your love instead of trying to ship it through the mails. I’d give
anything
to be with dear Lennie for just two hours in the old apartment, or even a fast twenty minutes! I’m minding my own business, hear, and patronizing the local library. One of the dentists isn’t bad looking in a Gregory Peckish way, but who needs someone used to saying, Open a little wider, please, this won’t hurt … much. Growing claws to fight with parents. Growing hoarse with no one to talk to. I miss you like crazy & our room & dearest sweetest Lennie & even those necking machines on the corridor with their plastic hymens and cashmere brains! Write soon. Tell me some good things to read.

Love, Donna

He lies along the seat with his knees raised and his heavy head in my lap. Through my cotton dress I can feel his breath. The slice of waning moon is up to roof level between the houses, ripe cantaloupe. It rained all day before clearing, leaving the city washed. Trees purl and riffle with the sound of a stream rushing over us. The houses of his neighborhood are drowned in darkness. His lids droop, his mouth relaxes. Suppose we lay in that house in a room on the second floor with the casements flung open level with the elm leaves? He would turn in his sleep murmuring and I’d lean on my arm to watch over him as he settled again…. My head lurches forward. Must not sleep! “What time is it?”

“Ummmmm.” He stirs, noses into my waist.

I reach for his wrist but he hides the watch under him. “Mike, it’s late.”

He yawns with a voluptuous heave of his shoulders. “Always damned late.”

“Mother spoke to me again about staying out so long.”

“Likewise and then some.” He scrubs his knuckles across his eyes. “After I drop you off I feel raw. I hardly ever get to sleep before it’s light.”

“I wish we could just once sleep and wake in the same bed.”

“When I was a kid I caught the flu. They piled the bed with quilts so I’d sweat it out. When I leave you, I have to burn you out of my system before I can sleep.” His eyes are wide open, black. “Listen, I love you.”

“I love you.” Words are too feeble to relieve the pressure in my chest. I can only run my hands over his heavy-boned face and say it again and again. Quarrels rub me raw and weary. My parents find me an irritant. Every day I hate my job more. At home I feel as if I have been forced back into early adolescence with no community, no friends, no support group. I am losing my sense of myself. Only with him is there any tenderness and communication.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

W
HAT THE
T
EA
L
EAVES
S
AID

S
ATURDAY I GET up to find Mother at the kitchen table—cleared except for the teapot, a cup and an ashtray—smoking her semiannual cigarette. On her vanity she keeps a wooden chest of gold-tipped Russian cigarettes Uncle Murray the small-time comedian gave her when I was a toddler. Although she is not a smoker, he guessed their exotic appearance would take them out of the category of what she calls “that filthy habit.” A year goes by while she never takes a cigarette out. Then one evening after supper on a day that feels no more unusual than any other, she appears with a slender brown cylinder cupped elegantly between her fingers, acting in her own movie. Then I see in her the young beauty from the slums, studying seductive graces in darkened theaters. All she had to save herself was encompassed in being female.

“It’s late for breakfast,” she says. “There’s tuna fish salad for lunch.”

“You could have got me up.”

“You were out so late, I was sure you must be tired.”

“It’s the weekend,” I say in automatic defensiveness. While I eat, wisps of smoke from the scant tobacco curl from the cylinder as if blown through a straw. She is so silent I look at her with surprise, but she seems absorbed in her ritual. Not till she has tapped out the gilt mouthpiece does she rouse herself, then to pour me tea.

Leaves float thickly in the cup. “You forgot the strainer.”

“So I did. I’ll read the leaves for you.”

I shrug, embarrassed. She read my palm when they brought me home from the hospital but never since. When I was little and jealous of the women in the kitchen, I used to beg her to read the leaves for me. “Jill’s going to like to go to school this year and she’s going to be a good girl and help her mother cheerfully.” “Am I going to get a bike?” “That isn’t clear yet,” she would say sadly, meaning the money was iffy.

She takes the cup to brood over it. I lean my cheek on my hand, a yawn stretching my jaws. Maybe I’ll sunbathe in the yard and read
Sons and Lovers
if she doesn’t make me help clean the house. I’m pallid next to Mike. Then she shoves the cup toward me, a wave of tea sloshing out. She stares and I stare back until I say, “So, what’s up? You see the sign of the hangman in the cup?”

“No. The sign of the beast.”

Oh, we’re in for some nasty weather. “Come on, Mother. Maybe I can have a cup of coffee instead.”

“I cannot be mistaken.” She stabs her finger at the cup. “You’re sleeping with him—with that boy.”

The room settles into new shapes. “What?” I cannot help following her finger to the bottom of the cup.

Her lip curls. “You heard me.”

I force a sticky smile. “I don’t believe I heard correctly.” I consider saying she damn well knows I sleep here, but playing with language strikes me as inadvisable, given her expression.

“You’re sleeping with that boy!”

“Mike, I suppose? God, Mother, you used to think Howie and I—”

“Do you have the nerve to call on Him? We raise our children to have them lie to our faces. Carrying on like a bitch in the alley!”

I jump from my chair. “Stop it! I’m going outside.”

She brings her fist down, rattling the cups. “Sit down! Do you want the neighbors to hear?”

I sit, my stomach hardening. I do in fact hear the whir of an electric mixer. Mrs. McAllen next door must be baking a cake.

“Not that they don’t guess already with you coming in at two every morning.” She swells with rage. “You’ve given yourself to him not once but many times. You’ve been playing me for a fool, carrying on behind my back. Traitor to your mother!”

Fascinated I stare. Then I snap to. “What do you want?”

“Don’t try to brazen it out! You think I’m blind, I can’t see it in the leaves?”

“You see what you want.”

“How can you sit and eat my food, knowing what you’ve done? Have you no pride? My daughter, my only daughter, a slut.”

“I have lots of pride.” I clamp shut. Only by lying can I protect. “You’ve been accusing me since I was twelve. Lay off it. I’ve been working hard all week and I don’t need a lousy weekend.”

“Can you deny it? Look me in the eyes.”

I meet her angry gaze. “Sure.”

“Now I know you’re lost.” She pulls a folded paper from her apron and throws it down.

Gingerly I lift it. Donna’s handwriting.

July 10, 1954

Dear Stu,

Somehow I haven’t had the energy to answer. The less I do, the less I can do. Like oversleeping and waking up exhausted. I write Lennie every night….