Stolen Pleasures (17 page)

A Black Sheep. Their mother said their father was a Black Sheep, and so did his two brothers, who came once to visit. They wore suits that had no wrinkles, and Delia guessed that their shirts were not washed and ironed by a wife or a daughter, as her father's shirts were, but by someone not part of the family. They must have grown older faster than her father. Their faces were creased, their hair already gray, while her father's hair was dark and curly all around his bald spot. One brother was a furrier, the other a jeweler,
but they brought neither furs nor jewels. They brought only their Black Sheep tag for this youngest brother, who put his head to the side and smiled, too, over what they called him. So a Black Sheep was not so bad a thing to be, if he could smile over it.

The brothers looked around in a way that seemed not looking, not interested, that saw emptiness where there was no overstuffed couch and no rugs and no piano and no real living room. They did not look at Delia, but they looked at Fleur, who did not look even once at them, and they saw more than Delia had seen before and opened to her eyes her sister's long shapely legs and high breasts and what appeared to be Fleur's desire to conceal herself. A desire that was modesty, her father explained to his brothers, which made them smile once more.

Silent critics of their brother, they diminished everything down to what they'd expected of a Black Sheep. If Delia's father had wanted something from them, it wasn't given. The brothers had come from Denver, where their old mother, who was in her nineties, and their father, who was even older and who went to a synagogue every day to praise God, lived in a large house of three stories. Once in a while Delia heard her parents mention her father's sister, Sophie, but she seemed to be dead.

Their father said he was born “at the turn of the century,” and his family in Denver, he said, didn't know that when one century comes to an end, another century begins, and times change, and people's thinking changes. His family, he said, was stuck in the Past. His brothers were married to very rich and homely women, sisters, who didn't invite him into their homes when he was visiting his family.

Delia's mother was always charmingly lively around people, even those she didn't know. She was born in a very small country over in Europe, whose name neither Fleur nor Delia could remember when teachers asked where their parents were born. When Delia did remember, she was ashamed to say it because nobody had ever heard of it. Aunt Goldie, their mother's sister, and her daughter, Cousin Jean, came once in a while when their father wasn't home. They drove up in a big Packard, bringing chocolates and cookies, Jean in furs and diamonds given her by a generous man who was in the movies, in exchange, their mother said, for Jean's own kind of generosity, her plumpness and her kisses and high spirits. Jean tried to teach Fleur the fox-trot, but Fleur kept looking down at her feet to make them mind, and they wouldn't, and Delia, trying, too, wasn't much better at it because she was watching Fleur to help her out. Delia tried to listen to the song Jean was humming, but it was a song just for people who knew how to dance to it.

Their father told their mother about intelligent men he had interesting talks with, and so Delia hoped he had friends away from home, probably at the company where he was a printer, friends who simply never had time to come to visit. Together with their mother he had one friend at home, but since Mr. Bonner was their mother's friend, too, and called her Eva, and came by to see her when their father was away, he could not be confirmed as more their father's than their mother's friend. He and their father talked together in the yard and shook hands whenever they met, and he called their father by his first name, Maurice, though their father called him only Mr. Bonner.

Mr. Bonner honored them by coming to their house, while other bankers were to be seen only at their desks. He always wore a suit the color of cream, a Stetson hat the same color, and his shoes were always polished, and not, Delia was sure, by his wife, as her father's were, every night. Taller than her father, who was stocky and whose chest was broad and who had a bushy mustache and wore a cap and a wrinkled brown suit from a department store basement, Mr. Bonner stood stolidly high, his face smooth as a woman's, his eyes so palely blue Delia wondered if her father's brown eyes could see more.

Mr. Bonner sang whispery songs just for himself to hear. Some times, when Mr. Bonner came to see their mother, she would leave what she was doing and go off with him, telling Fleur she was coming back very soon. She wore just her housedress and her legs were bare, a tall slender woman with dark, bobbed hair. One dress that Delia was to remember had little orange flowers in the print of it.

On one of those afternoons when their mother was gone, Delia persuaded Fleur to come with her into the front house where the oil workers lived and who were away at work on Signal Hill. They always left their back door open, the screen door banging away in a warm wind all day. Delia's mother, who was their landlady, called the oil workers by their first names and cleaned their house and made their beds for them. On Sunday afternoons when their girlfriends were visiting, Delia went in and accepted oranges and Oreo cookies and pretended she wasn't watching the way their girlfriends smoked, how they held their cigarettes and how they crossed their legs.

Fleur came reluctantly, that day, to the oil workers' house. Like her housekeeping mother, Delia picked up coins from the bedroom rug and set them in an honest row on the dresser top. That seemed a good deed to Fleur, who picked up a round, golden compact and set it alongside the coins.

Delia said “Open it up,” and Fleur would not, so Delia did. The cake of rouge was a rose petal larger than any real one.

Delia swept the kitchen floor. Then she went on into the living room, directly to the phonograph, and lifted the lid.

“You shouldn't do that,” said Fleur.

Wanting to hear for herself the music the pretty women danced to, Delia set the needle down at the edge of the record. The music blared out without a beginning and didn't go back to start over. It came faster than other music and was made by many people who all seemed to know that what they wanted from life was just what they'd get, and much more, and soon, even right that instant. Her mother had said it was Jazz. The music invited her in and pushed her out. The music was the property of the pretty women who kicked off their high heels and swished their skirts around their hips and threw themselves down on the oil workers' laps. She lifted the arm to make the music stop, but the arm got away from her small sneaky hand and cut a long willful scratch across the record.

 

YEARS LATER, WHEN she came to live with Delia, Fleur, bothered by memories imposed on her just as their life back then had been imposed on her, asked Delia, out of the blue, “Do you remember Mr. Bonner?”

Delia said that she did. She remembered that Mr. Bonner had visited one time after they'd moved, when their mother was already blind, and that a few years later a letter had come from his son, telling them that his father had died.

“Do you remember that quarrel Mama and Papa had?”

Fleur, asking that question, opened up for Delia the realization that the quarrel between their mother and father, their only quarrel she'd ever heard, was not really about politics, as she'd always thought. Their father had just come home, he was sitting in a chair, taking off his shoes, and he was saying that Mr. Bonner called union organizers wild-eyed Reds, that Mr. Bonner was a leech, that it wasn't the meek who were going to inherit the earth. Fleur and Delia, trembling on the other side of the half-open door, were told to go away.

“What makes you remember that quarrel now?” Delia asked.

“I don't know,” said Fleur.

But Delia knew. By bringing up that scene, Fleur was divulging at last her long-ago wondering about their mother's stolen pleasures. Within a year or so after that quarrel, they lost their little house and the house where the oil workers lived, and moved to a lying-low kind of house that wasn't theirs, that was next door to a squab farm, from where the feathers off the poor caged birds drifted over and down onto their beds and bare floors. That's where they were when their father died, and that's where they were when darkness closed in around their mother, and she sat before her little radio, listening to the serial romances and waving her hand before her eyes, hoping to see it take shape again out of the dark, and when she couldn't bear the dark anymore she tore at her
face, and they struggled with her to hold down her arms, Fleur on one side, Delia on the other. That's where they were, still, when their mother's hands began to twist up, her hair turn stiff and gray, her body become hard peaks and hollows under the blankets, and that's where they were when Fleur must have given up wondering, almost forever but not forever, what stolen pleasures were all about.

One night when they were undressing in Delia's apartment, by their two single beds, Fleur, her back turned, modest even in the presence of her own sister, said, “I want to tell you something,” and waited until they were both under their covers and Delia had switched off the lamp between them.

“When you began to stay out all night, do you remember?”

“I remember,” said Delia.

“Do you remember how Mama used to say you were like Sophie?”

Their mother had said it from her bed, aware in her darkness that Delia was slipping on her coat. Who knew when Delia would come back and who knew what she did when she was away?
Sophie had terrible moods, like you. Sophie made trouble for everybody, like you. You just came home this morning, why can't you stay and rest?
And what had Delia answered, shocking herself with that answer? “I'll rest in my grave,” she had said, and saw how it shocked their mother, too, this gripping sense of mortality in a girl so young.

“You never thought how hard it was on me,” said Fleur.

Delia had lost touch with Fleur in those years of her desire for the love of men, those years of humiliating herself for men in the hope of proving unforgettably precious to them.

“When you stayed out all night, Mama said terrible things were going to happen to you. She never slept. Nights were like nightmares for me. I told you but you didn't care. Then you left me alone with her forever when you came here.”

Then Fleur turned away. She had so much to say it could be said only a little at a time.

At certain times in the night, Fleur's breathing took on the sound of sorrow kept down in her breast. Of sorrow that her young life had been taken from her while she'd hoped it was yet to come. And Delia said to her sleeping sister: I had to leave, I had to find my own life, but it was never and may not ever be the life you thought I was enjoying. Mean things happened to me I never told you about. Not terrible things like Mama said were going to happen, just mean things that make life itself seem mean and you wonder why you're living it. I took a job where I did the dishes and polished the silver, and for that I got a room near the kitchen, and so I didn't have to pay rent anywhere and I could send money to you to add a little to what Papa's relatives sent. I'd come home there from my other jobs, and one night when I was drying the dishes, the family kids, a boy and a girl, twelve, thirteen, kids with cold hearts, used the dish towels like whips and slapped me in the face with them. I put my hands over my face, that's all. I used to be your defender when I was a kid, I used to fight back for you, but I couldn't do it for myself.

Delia took Fleur to the museums. Culture meant that you could fill the emptiness of your life with marvelous things that were out there for everyone to share in. They wandered over the marble floors, attempting interest in the paintings and the sculpture and the rooms of historical furniture, Fleur soon wearied by her
incomprehension of so many objects of value. There was always one woman in the museum throngs, or a child, who kept glancing at Fleur to figure her out: her refugee look, her sacrificial look, her look of displacement. No one could ever even hope to know where Fleur came from.

She took Fleur to a bookstore a friend had told her about, where you could look at handmade books that were works of art, the words of famous writers exquisitely printed on the finest papers you would ever see. Collectors paid a lot for them, her friend said. Distant, delicate guitar music seemed to be inviting into the store even those not about to buy anything. A woman came out of her office, suspicious of these two who must look abashed by their own selves, like thieves who had just stolen something from somewhere else. Delia sensed Fleur moving back in fear from Mrs. Chase, who had never been paid for those last violin lessons.

Taking Fleur's hand, such a small hand for an older sister, Delia urged her on to the array of open books along the shelves.

Fleur took her glasses from her purse and put them on, using them as an invitation to touch a page.

“It's a poem,” said Fleur.

“There are gloves for that,” said the watching woman, and so there were. A basketful of white cotton gloves. “If you don't put them on you'll have to leave. I'd rather you leave.”

Shakily, Fleur put her glasses away.

“My sister's hands are clean,” said Delia. “You're the one who shouldn't touch.”

They left, Fleur's head bent, Delia's high.

“People always looked down on us,” Fleur said that night.

“Not everybody,” said Delia.

“Everybody.”

“That's an awful way to think.”

“Papa's family did,” said Fleur. “They looked down on us. Papa said they were so strict, how they had separate plates for milk things and separate plates for meat. I used to think they looked down on us because we didn't have separate plates.”