Chocolates for Breakfast (2 page)

She smiled when Courtney came in, and motioned to a chair. Courtney sat down and took off her blazer while Miss Rosen made a notation on an English paper that she was correcting. She put the paper down on her cluttered desk.

“How are you coming with James Joyce?” she asked pleasantly.

“Not awfully well,” Courtney confessed. “What is he trying to say with all this stream-of-consciousness gibberish?”

Miss Rosen picked up the book from the table beside Courtney and thumbed through the pages Courtney had been reading.

“What he is talking about in
Finnegan's Wake
,” explained the English teacher in her precise, analytical manner, “is the eternal conflict between parents and children. He presents the parent as the figure who must be conquered if the child is to gain independence and identity.”

“How simply and clearly she puts it,” Courtney thought as Miss Rosen went on, quoting from the book and analyzing the selections to prove her thesis, “when the subject is so terribly complex. Teachers are a little like scientists in their way of breaking down the magnificent vastness of life into small particles that can be analyzed, and thereby robbing it of its emotion.” She remembered the scene when her mother had said she could not spend that weekend with her father because she had too much schoolwork to do.

“You're trying to possess me,” Courtney had accused her over the long-distance telephone. “You know that I have to have your permission for school because you're listed as my guardian. You don't want to give it to me, you want me to stay at school when I have a free weekend, because you're so afraid that I might find one of these days that I really like Daddy.”

“Now Courtney, don't be unreasonable. Your father is a very fine man and I should hope that you like him. You just wrote me that you have a term paper due next Monday and you didn't see how you could get it in in time, and now you call me to see if you can spend the weekend in New York.”

“I'll get the paper in late. It's all right, because I have an A in medieval history anyway, and it won't make so much difference. I don't want to stay here when I have a free weekend. You're trying to possess me, that's all, and you're using the paper as an excuse.”

“I couldn't want less to possess you, and you're always accusing me of it. My life would be a great deal simpler if I didn't have you to worry about and take care of,” she said angrily. “I could run it the way I want to. I'd still be married to Nick now if it weren't for you. I had to choose between my second husband and my child, so of course I chose you. You bitch up my life because I have a sense of responsibility for you, and now you accuse me of wanting to possess you. Go ahead and stay with your father, spend your life with him for all I care!”

Courtney had thanked her mother and hung up before she could change her mind.

“He outlines the overthrowing of the parent by the child who has come of age,” Miss Rosen was saying.

Courtney thought of Janet's father when they had double dated with a beau of Janet's and his roommate at Andover. Janet went out with the boy a great deal, and his roommate had driven them back from Jones Beach with Courtney in the front seat so that his roommate and Janet could “make out” in the back seat. When they went into Janet's apartment on Park Avenue, her father had been sitting with a glass of Irish whiskey and had seen that Janet's lipstick was smeared, and had been terribly rude to the boy, saying to him, “I suppose you have been
necking
with my daughter all the way back from Jones Beach!” Of course he had, but Mr. Parker made everyone feel so embarrassed that they left very soon and went to the Plaza instead. Janet apologized for her father. “Daddy was a little bombed,” she laughed, “and he always thinks that I'm being led into dissipation or something.” Janet even necked with boys that she did not like, and her father knew it and always blew up at her, cutting her allowance whenever she was even a little late.

“He completes the cycle,” Miss Rosen continued, “by showing how the child of that child will overthrow him in turn, in a primitive ritual which civilization has only disguised but not altered.”

“The cycle?” Courtney said stupidly.

“You haven't been listening,” Miss Rosen chided. “You remember how I showed you that the very last sentence in the book is the beginning of the very first sentence, how they run together?”

Courtney nodded.

“Well, his book runs around in a circle, so to speak, because he is using even the form of the novel to indicate the parent-child-parent cycle of successive revolutions.”

“I guess I see now, but I certainly never would have by myself. Gee, I have a pretty good vocabulary, but every fifth word is something I've never even heard of.”

“He invents a lot of words, like the famous sound of the thunder, and he also uses words in German, Gaelic and God knows what all.”

She smiled and handed the book back to Courtney.

“Try the next ten pages for tomorrow, and if you get discouraged, I have a
Key to Finnegan's Wake
that you can borrow. It explains some of the references. I'd rather that you tried to get something out of it yourself, though.”

She got up and turned the stack of records over in the victrola, and then sat down and lit a cigarette.

“I haven't had a chance to talk to you since spring vacation,” Miss Rosen said. “How did you and your mother get along?”

“We got on fairly well,” Courtney said. For a moment she resented the presumed familiarity of the older woman's question. She always withdrew instinctively when she sensed that someone had slipped through her defenses. But then she remembered that Miss Rosen was a friend. “We always do.” She was still guarded. Both Miss Rosen and she knew that this was not true, but Miss Rosen waited patiently for the familiar flow of words from the girl, for when they were alone she spoke freely as she had never been able to speak to a woman. Courtney was a girl who had a whole string of what she termed “adopted fathers,” usually friends of her mother, to whom she told the worries and fears that a child can never relate to her own parents. Miss Rosen was the first woman whom she had trusted since she lost confidence in her mother at the age of six.

“We can't communicate, that's all. She doesn't know me very well, and she knows me less every time she sees me on a vacation. I'd talk to her if I could,” she went on, “but you know, you can't talk to women. Their minds don't run straight the way even yours does; I try to talk about something and prove a point and their minds have skittered off to some minor but vaguely related subject. Drives me crazy.”

“Don't you think of yourself as a woman?” Miss Rosen said, amused.

“No, not really,” Courtney said thoughtfully. “I don't think the way they do. Men always tell me that I think like a man. It would be a lot simpler if I were a man. I guess. But maybe it wouldn't be. I probably would still dislike women, and it would be an awful mess to be a faggot.”

Miss Rosen laughed at her simplicity. “Would you really like to be a man?”

“Well, you know, since I can remember I've dreamt that I am a man. I hardly even notice now that in all my dreams I'm myself, but a man. I wonder why that is,” she mused.

“You said that your parents always wished you were a boy, and that your mother has you make drinks for her and take care of her the way a son would. Perhaps that's why.”

“Perhaps.” She thought about that for a moment, but not long, because it wasn't very important for her.

“You know,” she went on, “Mummy was awfully upset about my vacation being screwed up.”

“Don't use that expression,” Miss Rosen said.

“Why not? I have used it since I was a little girl. What's wrong with it?”

Miss Rosen did not pursue the matter further, but instead said, “You're always a little hostile and defensive after you have been with your mother.”

“She's a bitch,” Courtney blurted out.

“You know you don't mean that,” Miss Rosen said gently.

“I know,” she answered petulantly.

“Then why did you say it?”

“I wanted to.”

“You're too intelligent to talk like a little girl.”

“Dammit, I
am
a little girl,” Courtney said suddenly. “And that's what I hate about being with Mummy. It's as though
I'm
the mother. I have to soothe her when she's npset about having blown up at me, and I have to reassure her that she's a good actress—you know, I've only seen four of her movies in my whole life, it's enough to live with the parts—I wouldn't know if she's any good or not, but I tell her she is because I like to make people feel good. And I have to hold her hand when Nick periodically leaves her—or
did
leave her,” she said remembering, “and I have to fix her lousy drinks because she doesn't like to feel she's drinking alone, and all that. I'm
awfully
sick of it!”

“Now, although I've never met your mother,” Miss Rosen said, “I know that she's a very immature woman, but you have to put up with that and try to help her. She's also a very lonely woman, and you're really all that she's got—particularly now that she's divorced again.”

“You're so damned holy,” Courtney said bitterly. “I mean, you're just like my father. You say all these things and it's easy for you because you don't have to live them. This is all a lot of crap.”

Miss Rosen flinched. She got up and put her hand on Courtney's shoulder.

“You don't have to talk that way with me,” the woman said gently. “You can relax when you're here. You don't need to strike out in self-defense, through a fear of getting close to me.”

Courtney stared moodily ahead. She knew that if she looked up at Miss Rosen while that hand was on her shoulder, she would get that funny feeling that she sometimes had when she was taking a bath or about to put on her pajamas, as though a whole crowd of people were looking at her body.

“You told me once,” she said searching, “that you loved me.”

Miss Rosen took her hand away and sat on the bed facing Courtney.

“Yes, you poor child, I do. Why do you ask me again—don't you believe that anyone can love you?”

“Not unless they want something from me.”

She saw the expression on Miss Rosen's face and said, “Yes, honestly, that's the way I feel. And don't call me a ‘poor child'! I'm not to be pitied, not by anyone. Nobody needs to feel sorry for me, because I can take care of myself, and I always have. I don't even need anyone to love me, because people don't mean that much to me. I'm a cold person, and kind of selfish.”

Miss Rosen sighed. “No you're not. Haven't I taught you
anything
? I don't know who or what gave you that idea, but you're a very warm, impulsive girl, with the potential to be a fine woman if you give yourself a chance to love and to be a mature person.”

Courtney looked up at Miss Rosen, the defiance gone for the moment from her face, so that she looked almost like a child.

“Maybe I can be all that if you help me. When I'm here I feel that you have something I can hold on to. Since I've been with you I've seen that people can tell other people that they love them, and trust other people, without being afraid of being rebuffed or taken advantage of.”

Miss Rosen lit another cigarette from the one she was smoking because she did not like to say what she knew she eventually must say.

“Mummy said I was like a different person when I came to Hollywood last Christmas,” she said proudly. “She said I was like somebody she didn't know. I wasn't so afraid of her, and I didn't jump so much when she called my name. You did that for me,” she said, trying to draw a response from the older woman.

“You know, Courtney,” she said painfully, “I did have something I wanted to say to you. After all that you've been saying it's going to be very difficult for me, because I do love you, but I feel it's for your own good. Would you like a cigarette?”

“No, thank you, I don't smoke. Gee, it must be something grim,” she smiled. “Staff members only offer cigarettes to girls who have tried to commit suicide, or whose engagements have been broken or something.”

The girl was trying to be flippant because she sensed that what Miss Rosen had to say would hurt her.

“I enjoy your coming over here very much. I like to talk to you, because you have a good mind and I'm very fond of you.”

Oh God, thought Courtney, don't say what I am afraid you are about to say.

“But you know, you should spend more time with people your own age. There is a lot that you can learn from them, and there are girls here with fine minds who have read quite as much as you have.”

“I'm bored with people my own age,” she said desperately. “I've always grown up with Mummy's friends, and I find it easier to talk to them. I find older people more interesting.” She searched the woman's face for understanding. “You know that.”

“That's just the point,” Miss Rosen said. “You've never learned to get along with your contemporaries, and Scaisbrooke gives you a fine chance to learn. That's a more important lesson than you'll ever get from me.”

Courtney stood up. She felt the way she had when she learned, through the
New York
Times
, of her mother's marriage to Nick Russell in Hollywood. Courtney had the same half-comprehending feeling now, a vague realization that she was losing someone whom she loved.

“You mean that you don't want me to come over here in the evenings any more, and that you don't want me to sit at your table or talk to you after class.”

“Yes, that's what I mean,” the woman said helplessly.

“Then why don't you say it? I can take it.” She threw the copy of
Finnegan's Wake
on the bed. “I guess I'd better return this,” she said, and turned to walk out.