Raw Silk (9781480463318) (11 page)

So that when Jill lapsed into straightforward childish greed or sulkiness, when she whined for candy or refused to put on her raincoat, I was relieved. I was comfortable. But wasn’t there something wrong with me, if I preferred my daughter in her worst moods?

And that was not the worst. The worst was that Jill seemed determined to pass civilization on to me. “Your language is revolting,” she would say imperiously at my least “goddam.” She herself locked the bathroom door and developed an obsession for closing others. Once when Phaideaux crapped on the back doormat she informed me that I kept “an unsanitary house.” Once when we sat on the Backs together, me in a low-cut summer cotton, she poked a finger toward my cleavage and whispered, “Pull your
dress
up, Mummy!” There flashed into my mind a moment from the summer when I was twelve, on the bus from Seal Beach to L.A., when my mother had said the same thing, with the same emphasis.

“Jesus,” I said to Oliver. “All my childhood my folks were passing moral judgments on me, and now I’m getting it from below. Any day now she’s going to start lecturing me on the evils of drink and fornication; I can feel it in the air.”

But Oliver did not see the humor of it, maybe because he knew I wasn’t joking—did Oliver still know when I was joking? “When parents and children pass the same judgments,” he said, hypothetical, “maybe there’s something in them.”

F
RANCES REMAINED THE SAME,
Malcolm’s insight into her trouble couldn’t be verified and had no use, because we couldn’t establish contact with her. When it was humanly possible to be silent, she was silent. Any work that could be done in a corner, she did in a corner. At such intervals as could be considered decent and necessary, she went into the W.C. to cry.

But one day the four of us left her in the office when we went to lunch. She was dittoing a memo to the bleachers and twisters, and Mom had asked her to finish the run before she left. We were all the way to the refectory before Dillis remembered that she hadn’t told her to lock the door.

“Do you think she’d know to?”

“How do you know what she’d know?” said Malcolm.

“I’ll go check,” I said. “I can do with the walk anyway.” I ambled back, taking my time. The locking of the door was a company rule, but I couldn’t see much danger of appliance-looting at high noon. I tried the knob, and it was open, all right, so I stepped in to twist the lock on the other side.

Frances was still there, on the floor beside the filing cabinet. She was on her knees, her forehead pressed into the rug and her weight thrown onto her elbows, her forearms reaching up with all the veins and sinews in relief, hands clenched open as if she were digging into air. Except for the claw-held hands it was the attitude of classic abjection, the kowtow to the East, the suppliant before the throne. Since she happened to be facing me this put me in a disconcerting position of eminence, and I hesitated, not knowing whether I should stay or go, not wanting to startle her and not knowing how to embarrass her least.

“Frances?”

I sat down on the carpet in front of her and was shocked by the sudden proximity of her hands, which were not just chapped and scratched but covered with thread-thin cuts in both directions. It was as if the backs of her hands were covered with a gauze of dry blood. The cuts had been made with a razor blade or an X-Acto knife; nothing else would have made them so straight and fine. When she straightened up and sat back on her haunches I also realized that she had lost weight. It was strange I hadn’t noticed it because I usually notice such things, but I suppose I had avoided looking at her directly. Even now the sweater and skirt were so formless that the loss was mainly evident in her face. Her hair, very dark and straight and badly cut, had grown halfway down her neck, and with her mouth moronically open to gulp air, her cheekbones made prominent, she was almost gaunt.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped.

“Don’t be sorry. It’s a relief. You’ve been trying not to bother us but you do bother us. You make us feel shut out. Don’t think it’s
kind.
” I’m glad, looking back on it, that I was able to begin on this irritably honest note. It wasn’t always so easy, but it wasn’t always so crucial either. She stared at me warily. Open, her eyes were Orphan Annie eyes, blank as a cartoon. I couldn’t know if she had taken any of that in, but at least she didn’t apologize again. I cast around for something else to say and came up with the obvious thing.

“Sometimes it helps to talk.”

“I don’t want help.”

It didn’t occur to me that she might really mean this. “But you’re very unhappy,” I explained, patient for a stupid child. “You can be helped to be less unhappy.”

“Then who would I be?”

I hardly heard her. The difficulty of learning to listen to Frances was that she used words in a stark and tenuous relationship to reality as she saw it, and the reality she saw was an enclosed space where I had never been. She lived on another plane. She talked a different language. She inhabited another sphere. The modes of expressing my exasperation were clichés by contrast with her severe literalness. She had no tact, no humor and no self-image to project. For concealment she used silence, for change action. But I couldn’t know this because I had never known anyone who did not use words for concealment and for change, and at the time I saw us in the very simple relationship of a confused child and a competent woman, who therefore had no option but sympathy.

“Have you always been unhappy?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I was different when I was at home.”

“Can you go home?”

She shook her head and began to cry. She made very little fuss about it. No squinting, no sobbing, just water out of her eyes. I think that crying was as ordinary to her as any other bodily evacuation, as necessary and as controllable. When she had not cried for a time she had to cry, and when she was done she was relieved until she needed to cry again.

“My brother writes me,” she said. “My parents came up once but they don’t know what to do with me. What can they do with me? They feel sorry for me and it makes them angry.”

“I can understand that.”

This unusually long speech seemed to give her impetus for another, and she volunteered, lifting on her heels as she drew breath, “After I dropped out I spent six months in a kibbutz in Israel. My tutor set it up for me. They said I could come back to Cambridge after, but they were wrong. I couldn’t.”

“You liked the kibbutz?” But she didn’t know the answer to this, opened her hands as she had for Dillis and then adjusted them to hide the cuts. “What did you do there?” I asked.

“I picked apples.”

“Was that better? Were you happier picking apples?”

“I picked apples,” she repeated. “I was some … I had a use.”

This seemed to be a clue and I charged in after it. I’m not sure I didn’t think that Frances’s neurosis could be dealt with summarily, by means of a strong dose of common sense. “Well, all right, but think of it in real terms, Frances. To how many people, how often, were the apples useful? You’re useful to us here. Dozens of people need those files.”

“They were apples, though,” she said desperately.

“But this is cloth. People have to cover themselves. Cloth is as necessary as apples. Somebody kept files on the apples.”

“No. Some days, I could see the apple trees.”

“You can see the filing cabinet!” I said, knowing even before she turned her blank gaze on the filing cabinet that this was a silly thing to say, but suddenly infuriated that I was missing a ham salad and a glass of beer in witty company in order to argue the relative merits of filing cabinets and apple trees with a girl so sick she didn’t, by her own admission, want to be helped.

“I
know
apple trees are more beautiful than filing cabinets,” I said. “It’s got nothing to do with use. How much beauty can you use? I know about apple trees. I’ve
got
apple trees.”

She turned and grasped my wrist. To be touched by her was a violence, she allowed so little contact, which she seemed to know because she let me go at once.

“Can you see them? Always?”

And suddenly I couldn’t answer in the same tone. It was as if some vague, persistent apprehension had been given focus. Since I gave Jill up I’ve walked my garden blind and cold, dutifully forcing myself to the perimeters and driven to count the strawberry plants in order to remind myself that it is there and mine. I saw, a little, what she meant. And to see even a little of what Frances meant was uncomfortable.

“No, not always.”

Shockingly because this time deliberately, Frances reached with her punished hand to touch my hand.

So I gave up still more of the time I had pleasure in, perhaps three hours a week of it, and three times a week Mom, Dillis and Malcolm would go off to the refectory while I had lunch with Frances. That is, I had lunch, and I brought enough for the two of us, varying the menu inventively in case I might happen on something that she would eat. The only thing I discovered was tomato juice. I argued that if she didn’t eat she’d get sick, but she argued that she got sick when she ate, and that nothing she put down could do her any good if she brought it up again.

All her logic was circular and unanswerable. She lived in effortful apathy, walking against water, always uphill, the monotony broken only by nightmare and despair. But the thing she feared most was an unresisting return to normality because, as she said, all that she knew was her own, was pain. It was the only part of her identity she believed in. Everything else had been attached to her, mosaic bits of her family, religion, society, school. “I know the pain is true. It’s hard and can be trusted. If it leaves me what can I trust?” She still had a few acquaintances at Cambridge, and she went out with them sometimes, drank beer and smoked a little grass. It relieved her. Afterward she paid for it in dry heaves of self-disgust. “They tell jokes and talk cinema and wear things they have bought for
so
little at a jumble sale. Nobody listens but everybody laughs. There is no reaching out. And I’m enclosed, so if I go and if I laugh, who am I?”

I couldn’t pretend that I saw no truth in this severe analysis. “All right, Frances,” I said, “then that’s the way it is. Look, everybody’s afraid and everybody hates himself a little. Every day you’re dishonest some way or other and every day you forgive yourself. You do what you can, you learn to laugh, and over and over again, you find your balance.”

“You do,” she agreed solemnly. “You find your balance. And then one day you don’t.”

And it was really as simple as that. Nothing terrible had happened to her. She had slept with a few men in seedy digs and found it unpleasant but untraumatic. She had tried pot, speed and LSD but experienced no trip as terrifying as those offered her by simple sleep. She had become an atheist without regret. Only, one day she had been unable to read a book. Because she couldn’t read, she couldn’t write her paper. Not having written her paper, she couldn’t face her tutor. One day she couldn’t eat meat, and she lived on massive quantities of rice and mashed potato until starch gradually became to her as unswallowable as blood. When she came back from the kibbutz she had once tried suicide, but failed so badly that no one noticed, and it left the leaden round of her life unchanged.

“It’s existential anguish, you know,” I said. “It’s very fashionable.”

“All right.” Frances shrugged.

I tried another time. “I’ve always thought it was cruel that you must go to university at the end of your teens. You’ve left one family and haven’t started another. You don’t know where you’re going to live, or who with, or what you’re going to do. It’s hard to study in so much uncertainty. I was unhappy in college too, and didn’t have any idea what direction I wanted to go.” This was not quite true. I had known I wanted to go east.

“But you found your direction,” Frances said.

“I made choices, and I guess the choices found my direction for me.”

“You made the right choices,” she pressed.

“How do I know? Nobody ever knows. I know if I could go back to university now I could concentrate.”

Naturally enough, when I talked about Frances to the others in Design Print, I took the opposite tack. It was they who argued sense and balance, and I who defended her absolute impotence. She should get out more, they said. She should eat three meals a day. She should take an interest in her looks.

“Of course she should. But where should she get the energy for the effort? People who have no talent should make up for it in industry. But industry is as much a gift as talent. It’s the same with Frances.”

“She wants to suffer.”

“Yes, all right. Wanting to suffer is part of the disease.”

“She should see a psychiatrist.”

“I know, but why? The idea revolts her. Unless she had some little faith it would help her, it wouldn’t help.”

“Well, then what can you do for her?”

“Nothing. I can sit on the floor. I can eat three sandwiches a week. Nothing, maybe. But so what? Suppose she’s terminally mad. When people have cancer or leukemia there’s nothing you can do, but you don’t refuse to change their sheets. You bring books and sweets, you sit there. It’s perfectly futile but you stick to it because as long as they’re alive you have to let them feel they’re part of the living.” Embarrassed by my eloquence, I added, “Some sucker’s got to hold her hand.”

“It’s a bitch,” Malcolm granted.

“It is. And it’s also somehow fine.”

This must be wrong. Obviously Frances was unbalanced, and the unremitting examination of her ego was as useless to anyone else as it was destructive to her. She was a bad influence on me, in the sense of a bad example, because she was of the people I knew the one who had most completely given up, most ceased to try. And yet her self-hatred seemed to me the only thoroughgoing honesty I had witnessed. It spared no crevices; it was the emotional equivalent of my father’s views on theft.

My own honesty was less complete. I shouldn’t have chattered about her to the others. I should have given them, as I gave Oliver, a bare outline of the anecdotal facts, because if she had chosen to extend her tentative contact to them she could easily have done so. So that when I rehearsed in the afternoon the hurt she laid bare at noon, I was betraying her in exactly the way that she understood betrayal. But I had to make a choice; they were curious and they were my friends. They had every precedent to expect I had no secrets from them. I wasn’t willing for Frances’s sake to shut out the people for whom I had an easier affinity. As if it would compensate her for this choice, I aggrandized her intelligence, dignified her suffering. Whereas the lunches themselves were tedious, full of awkward silences and repetitions of the same grim ground, in describing them to Malcolm, Mom and Dillis I left out those parts and gave them only the moving moments, the flashes of perception. I liked Frances better talking about her than talking to her.