Carriage Trade (30 page)

When the evening's over—and Mother likes to be home no later than eleven fifteen—an even more elaborate routine begins. First, if she's been entertained at someone else's house, she'll sit down at her desk, before doing anything else, and write her hostess an illegible thank-you note. These notes, she insists, should be no less than a page and a half of notepaper in length and should include glowing comments on the food, the décor, the hostess's appearance, and the brilliance of the other company. Some people even claim to be able to read these notes. Billings will then take the thank-you note directly to the post office so that, with luck, it will be delivered to the hostess in the next day's mail. Or, if the hostess is a neighbor, Milliken will hand-deliver the note the following morning, accompanying it with a long-stemmed rose.

Now, with her bread-and-butter duty done, Mother will begin to prepare herself for bed. I've often sat with her in her bedroom while she undressed, as she moved about, taking those light, quick steps, between her closets, dressing room, bedroom, and bath, chatting away about the details of the evening, reappearing in a succession of garments as she went. Wasn't it Mary Poppins who astonished the children with the way she could put on her nightgown first and then remove her street clothes from underneath the nightgown? Mother's changing-for-bed act is something like that. She'll vanish into a closet in a ball gown. Then she'll reappear in a slip or teddy. She'll disappear again and return in a long dressing gown. She'll disappear
again
and reemerge in a nightie and fluffy peignoir. Then the peignoir gets replaced with a bed jacket. These changes are so quick that they seem to be done with mirrors, and the result of this sleight of hand is that I've never in my life seen my mother naked or in anything more revealing than a swimsuit.

Now it's time for her to put her hair up on the big rollers and to tie the rollers in place with netting. Then she removes her makeup with creams and more tissues. Soap, Georgette Klinger tells her, must never touch a woman's face. Every night, on her dressing table, Margaret places two halves of a lemon in saucers and, while Mother works on her face, she rests her elbows in the lemon halves to bleach them. With the makeup off, more groceries appear: cucumber slices. She pats the cucumber slices all over her face and throat. Next come the various night-working creams, some for the forehead, some for the earlobes, some for the lips. There are also special night creams for the elbows, the knees, the arms, and the legs, creams for the backs of the hands, creams for the palms, creams for the toes and the soles of the feet. Applying these creams takes at least half an hour, while the whole bedroom begins to smell of lemons and cucumbers and aloe and beeswax.

But once a week, usually Friday night, the room smells of brimstone. This is when she's applying her mud pack. This is no ordinary mud, mind you. Her masseur introduced her to this mud several years ago. It's imported from Israel, where it's scooped up from the bottom of the Dead Sea. It's the color of caviar, costs twice as much, and smells like rotten eggs. But the dried mud from the Dead Sea caves helped preserve the scrolls at Qumran for over two thousand years, didn't it? Just think of what it ought to do for a woman's face to help erase the tiny little lines of aging!

She spreads this mud in a thin layer all over her face and throat. Then must come a full facial mask of stretchy Ace bandage material to keep the mud in place while it dries for an hour. This mask has holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth, so my mother looks like an extraterrestrial, or a bandit in a ski mask about to hold up a bank. With the mask on, it's hard for her to talk because she can't move her lips without cracking the mud. When the mud is dry, the mask comes off, and the mud gets chipped away. Then come more night creams.

Then comes a glass of hot skim milk sipped through a bent hospital straw, and finally the sleep mask and the cold-cream-lined night gloves, and the long slender gloved hand reaching out, half blindly, to switch off the final lamp.

On weekends at the farm, the routine is a little less stringent, but there's still a routine. At the farm, she'll wash and set her own hair and do her own comb-outs. Instead of the trainer and the masseur, she'll play tennis, or walk in the woods, or work out on the machines in the gym in the pool house. Instead of a nap, she'll meditate on the bridge in her Dell Garden before bathing and dressing for dinner. After all, in Old Westbury there are still lunches and dinners to go to, and house guests to entertain.

All this she does in the name of Beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, but what is in the eye that the beholder beholds? To me, my mother is a riddle.

There's another question I've often asked myself. Did my mother and father ever fuck? I guess they must have, at least once, as I guess I'm the living proof. But how did they accomplish that through all the masks, the creams, the nets and rollers, and the smelly Jewish mud? Was it any wonder that he took a mistress?

My mother often complains that I don't tell her enough about what's going on in my life. It's true, I don't. Because if I told her some of the things I'm doing she simply wouldn't understand. It's like she comes from a different planet. She doesn't understand why I want to run the store. I haven't told her about the marketing and business courses I'm taking at night at N.Y.U., because she wouldn't understand that either.

She couldn't understand why I didn't want to marry David Belknap, who was my last beau, if that's the word for it. What if I told her that David Belknap hit me? Would she have understood that?

David's an account executive with Merrill, Lynch. He makes a quarter of a million dollars a year, comes from a quote-unquote good family, and is good-looking in a Brooks Brotherish sort of way. To my mother, David seemed like Mr. Ideal for me.

David and I were pretty serious there for a while. At least we were living together, which I guess makes it serious. But things began to get unserious after about six months. You see, David wanted to marry me, move me to Scarsdale, and start me having his babies. I wasn't at all sure I was ready for that, and I told him so, and we argued about it. But our final argument started over, of all things, the woman sommelier in a restaurant where we'd just had dinner.

“That was the only thing that spoiled the dinner for me,” he said. “The lady wine steward.”

“I thought the wine she suggested was excellent.”

“Yeah, but women shouldn't be wine stewards,” he said. “Wearing a black bow tie, a man's mess jacket, and a skirt—she looked ridiculous.”

“Are you saying that women can't know as much about wines as men do, David?”

“There're just some things women shouldn't
do,”
he said. “Wine stewarding is one of them. Being professional jockeys is another. Last week, on my flight to Atlanta, a woman's voice came over the loudspeaker and said, ‘This is your captain speaking.' Everybody on the plane was scared shitless.”

“You mean the men on the plane were scared shitless. The women on the plane would have felt very reassured.”

“Person sitting next to me was a woman. She looked scared shitless.”

“Hmm,” I said. “I flew a Boeing seven-twenty-seven when I was nine years old.”

“Aw, come
on,”
he said. “I've heard that story. You didn't really fly that plane. But there's one thing a woman like you should do.”

“What's that?”

“You should marry a guy like me and have a nice little baby.”

“We've been through all this before,” I said. “I haven't changed my mind.”

“Even your mother thinks you should. Just the other day she said to me, When are you and Miranda—'”

I turned away from him. “I don't care what my mother thinks,” I said.

“Don't you think I'm good enough husband material? And father material?”

“That has nothing to do with it, and you know it,” I said. “It's because of my job, my career.”

“Career? What kind of a career is that? Placing the same little ad in the same newspapers day after day. Some career you've got!”

That made me mad. “There's a lot more to it than that!” I said. “I'm working my way up in my father's business. Someday I'm going to run the store.” It was the first time I'd told him that.

“Not if you marry me, you won't,” he said. “You're going to have to choose between your so-called career—and me.”

“Well, aren't
we
the Mr. Macho Man?” I said. “Aren't we Mr. Sexist Old World Husband? No women wine stewards! No women pilots! Join the twentieth century, David. This is nineteen ninety-one.”

“Sorry, but that's the way I am, sweetheart,” he said. “The girl I marry is going to be a
wife
, not some sort of career type. In
my
household, there's only going to be one breadwinner—me. The girl I marry is—”

“So now we're
girls
, are we? Really, David, you're beginning to sound like Stanley Kowalski.”

“Well, what you see is what you get,” he said, and a hard edge had crept into his voice. “And what you see is a guy who's ready to get married and start a family, because the girl I marry is going to start having babies
bing-bing-bing
, just like that.”

“Babies!” I cried. “Well, you're looking at the wrong woman for that assignment. Maybe I'll have a baby someday, but I'm certainly not going to start having babies
bing-bing-bing
, just like that—not for you or for anybody else!”

“Take it or leave it,” he said flatly. “You say you love me. If a woman loves a man, she has his babies.”

“Well, I'll certainly leave it, if that's my choice. If all you want me for is to be a machine—a machine that turns out babies like so much sausage—go find yourself another sausage machine. Babies! First it was just
a baby
, singular. Now it's a whole nursery full! I happen to be advertising director of Tarkington's, with a brilliant career ahead of me, which doesn't include flopping around your house barefoot and pregnant all the time. Why do you want all these babies? So you can prove how much juice there is in that pathetic little sausage you seem to think is God's gift to women? So you can prove how masculine you are? So you can brag to the boys in the club locker room about how high your sperm count is?”

That was when he hit me, hard, across the face, with the back of his hand—a hand that had a heavy gold signet ring on it.

The blow sent me reeling into the sofa, and I sat there with my hand across my mouth. I remember that I just whispered, “You hit me!” just like that—more in wonder than in anger, because I'd never had a man hit me before. I looked at my hand, and it was covered with blood. The signet ring had split my bottom lip.

“You're damn right I did,” he said, “and I'll do it again if you can't button that foul little mouth of yours, sweetheart!”

“You don't want a wife,” I said, “you want a beautiful ornament to show off to your friends and customers. You want a whore. You want someone like—someone like my mother, who'll let a man walk all over her like a doormat and lack her when she disobeys. Well, I'm not like my mother!”

“Damn right. Your mother is a lady!”

“And if you're looking for something to kick around the house, buy a dog!”

“That,” he said carefully, “is not such a bad idea, sweetheart,” and he turned on his heel and started toward the door.

I stood up then. “David,” I said in the sweetest voice I could muster, “please come back.”

He hesitated, and then he turned and stepped toward me. He held out his arms and took me by the shoulders. Then he dipped one hand inside my blouse, and started to fondle my breast, and bent his face toward me to kiss my bloodied lip. “Now that's more like it,” he said. “Now you're acting like my good little girl.”

That was when I brought my knee up, hard, into his groin. I'd never done that before to a man, but I'd read enough in romance novels as a kid to know it was something a woman could do to make a certain point, and it worked.

He howled and doubled over in pain, clutching at himself. “You fucking bitch!” he moaned.

“That,” I said calmly, “is one of the sweetest things you've said to me in a long time, David. Now get out of here before I call security. Get out of here and don't come back.”

That night, half waking from a crazy dream, I reached out across the big bed, half expecting to touch his shoulder with my hand. Then, fully awake, I realized he wasn't there, and wasn't ever going to be there again, and I opened my eyes wide in the darkness to find myself—triumphantly alone! I sat up in bed, then stood up and threw a robe across my shoulders. It happened to be his robe, but that fact only added to my sudden sense of triumph. Tying the robe's sash around my waist, I made my way through the darkened rooms of my apartment.

My apartment is on the twelfth floor, and it has a small terrace, and I stepped out onto the terrace and gripped the iron railing with both hands. I'd never had what I suppose you'd call an epiphany, but I knew I was having one now. The night was chilly, but the cold air felt good on my swollen lower lip, and the light breeze swirled the skirts of the long robe. I felt like Athena Nike in the Louvre. From my terrace there's a skinny view of Central Park and, across the park, a better view of the lights of the West Side. Everything—the wind, the park, the lights—seemed to be supporting me as I stood, with my wings spread, at the top of the Louvre's grand staircase, looking out and down. Through the trees, the lights of the West Side—the Dakota, the Majestic, the San Remo, all those grand old solid buildings in this city I love and know so well—they were twinkling for
me
. And I thought,
Oh, my city!
It was as though the lights bowed and returned my salute.