The Bride of Catastrophe (14 page)

To the mirror! Yes, I was blooming in spite of my hangover—Philippa had been right, I
was
beautiful. Or almost beautiful; I lifted my chin, I smiled, turned slightly and there it was, that cringing inwardness in my profile, a sort of stupidity, the refusal to look at myself, at anything, for fear of what I might see. Just then, though, the tent swayed up into the view behind me, catching on something deep in my imagination: my mother's vision of my future. Tents had billowed there too, and ships sailed across the horizon with ropes of starry lights swinging, dancers gliding on their polished decks.

Ridiculous notion, but I was infected with it, so this glimpse of tent made my heart beat and my hopes balloon. One deserves an indulgence on such a special day. Mine would be expectation. I'd done what my mother needed me to do, so my reward had to come in kind—in a few hours I'd have my degree and the right to live among those people I'd seen only through windows up until now, the kind of people who always knew what to do. Tomorrow I'd be home! A thousand beauties burst into my mind, things I wouldn't have guessed I remembered—the creek that cut through the back field and the wild irises that grew there, which newly dazzled my mother each spring: “Beatrice, look, the blue flag!” And the bubbles in the glass of the barn windows, the light shining in through the cobwebs, the moths dead on the sill. My eyes stung with tears. How had I ever left it? I felt the enchantment of that place around my shoulders like a magical robe.

Which I needed, because as I crossed the lawn toward the Student Union I heard Philippa calling. “Beatrice Wolfe?”

How was it she always managed to sound as if she had a megaphone? I stopped in my tracks and looked down at myself to see what I'd done wrong.

And met Philippa's squint of amused irritation. “Are you really wearing
that
to commencement?” she asked.

“What?” I asked, though I knew she hated my dress—two layers of gauze that floated over me light as an apple blossom; Bette Davis wouldn't have been caught dead in it.

“That … that
dirndl!
”

“It is not a dirndl,” I said, meaning to be dismissive but accidentally sounding defensive.

She drew back, hands on hips, the way she did midlecture when she was about to make a particularly savory observation. “As the author of the catalogue for the Costume Institute's
History of the Skirt
exhibition, I am afraid I will have to differ with you. And as your thesis advisor I must remind you that I have an investment in the way you look today.”

She said this with affection; she was showing me she really
did
care. Which meant that it would be unseemly of me to shriek: “And as my
ex-lover
you can just keep your nose out of
my skirts!
”

“What's the matter with that black dress, and where are the new shoes?” she went on. (She'd insisted I buy a pair of stiletto heels, saying that if Nancy Kissinger was five inches taller than Henry it was only fitting that I should tower over her.) “This … this is a
schmatta!”

“Well, it can't be a dirndl and a
schmatta
at the same time, can it?” I asked, exasperated, and found myself immediately waist deep in the history of the skirt and the relationship between German and Yiddish, and all the while watching with envy as my classmates slouched up the steps toward lunch. This commencement was not a momentous event to them. Next week they'd be in Paris, where some of them would eat in bistros so dreadfully out of fashion that the others would politely pretend not to see them as they passed. They were above haste, hunger, and sentiment, above any kind of longing. Philippa would never fit in with them, and thinking this, I couldn't help but feel a little spring of tenderness.

“I'll change,” I said. “I'll change as soon as I eat. Okay?”

“Okay.” And she went away happy. This was all she wanted, to organize the world into a picture that pleased her eyes. And to change—that was the easiest thing in the world for me.

*   *   *

SO AN
hour later, seeing my family straggling toward me over the little rise, like refugees from an utterly senseless war, I was unable to take flight, for fear of turning an ankle. My father in his city clothes—sparrow-brown suit and wingtips—looked tall and decisive, like a real businessman. No one would guess trees were turning to molten filaments in his mind. Dolly stuck carefully beside him; he was our representative of propriety. She was just thirteen, but nearly as tall as he was, and thin, her long, straight hair tied quickly back. She refused womanhood and the madness that must come with it. Sylvie had accepted this—she was wearing my high school graduation dress, hemmed to a miniskirt, a pair of Ma's sandals (she walked with her toes bent up to keep them on), and over it all, a heavy, scarred leather jacket. The skin of some boy she'd captured, I thought.

And Ma, blazing with a near-atomic radiance—the look with which she declared that she had never, ever cowered in a linen closet, that she fed her family on tinned sardines and fried puffball because she was fascinating and unconventional,
not
because she was afraid to face the ordinary, competent people in the supermarket, who might see through her, guess all that was wrong. Her dress looked like a stolen flag: striped red, white, and green, and slit all the way up to her hip, a fact particularly notable because of the magnificent strides she was taking in her attempt to be the first one to reach me, so she could give me her side of the story.

A pace away, she stopped, leaned back and spread her theatrical arms.

“Sweetheart,” she said, “Oh, my girl,” and took me in, resting her head on my shoulder as if she had never rested anywhere before. Behind her someone else's parents came along, the mother in shell pink, her husband's hand at the small of her back.

“I'm
so, so
glad to see you,” Ma said, with a certain emphasis that meant:
I'm the one who loves you, pay no attention to him.

“Him” stopped behind her, forlorn. He didn't have the strength of feeling to pull him into a natural embrace. He wanted love, but he had to stand there still as a stone, willing me to approach him. I went and kissed him, with pity and a small defiance. Ma would not be pleased.

“What's the matter?” I asked her, as we turned to go on.

“Oh, your father wouldn't let Teddy bring his favorite chicken,” she said in disgust.

Teddy was eight, with a head of sandy curls, freckles, a striped shirt—nothing to indicate he had the kind of second sight that's necessary if you want to tell one chicken from another.

“It's hopeless,” Sylvie said to me once we got out of Ma's earshot. “Just ignore them.”

This splendid suggestion would have been easier to put into practice if only we hadn't been made of their flesh. It was impossible not to feel their needs and wants, not to keep trying to fulfill them.

“Does Teddy have a favorite chicken?” I asked.

“He's afraid to go into the henhouse!”

“So he has some basic intelligence.” We laughed, and it all came back to me, the brooding clucks of the hens, unseen in the stinking feathery dark, the chickenshit slippery underfoot—Sylvie and I with our pool of secret knowledge, the exact feeling of those days.

“A little,” she allowed, grinning the way she used to, when she was going to do something like pour a bottle of perfume on the dog. “Might have been fun to have a chicken here.”

Sweetriver's one formal moment, and Ma wanted to bring a chicken. Formalities, conventions, that old sense of everyone coming together, dressing alike, acting alike, speaking alike for that one instant in recognition of the importance of the day, of common ideals and beliefs, even among the most disparate souls—all this was gone. The last legacy of the war in Vietnam was the notion that conventions ought to be smashed regularly, like gongs. So they were getting increasingly hard to find, and the few that were left made a dull, tinny sound when you struck them. And I, who had grown up dreaming of the day when I would step finally onto the scaffold of convention, found only thin air.

A tray of intricate little hors d'oeuvres came floating along and I floated after it. How was the pastry twisted to make the bit of cheese inside seem delightful, and what about the little watercress and brie
objet
with a tricornered hat of onion jam? I had to know. Ma had gone on ahead, striding directly into the path of Philippa, who stopped hummingbird-still to take her in, and flicked an incredulous gaze toward me.

“She does
not
resemble Mrs. Ramsey, dear,” she said when I got closer, and I remembered some midnight when I'd tried to convince her that my family was just like Virginia Woolf's. “More, the Red Queen! Yes, yes,
definitely
the Red Queen.” She laughed as discreetly as her nature would allow. It was her peculiar way of giving comfort—of showing me I had very amusing troubles, the best kind of troubles by far. Then she went off with Pedro de los Reyes, head of the Spanish department, to the buffet.

I gulped the onion jam thing (truly revolting) holding a shrimp toast delicately between two fingers, and, resolving to return for one of the cheese puffs later, performed a miracle of triangulation and seated my parents at opposite sides of the lawn from each other. Pop and Dolly were over near the Philosophy table—whose professors looked mangy as Rolling Stones—while I sat with the others near the Languages. Ma had her back to Philippa, and I was just about to bite the bullet and ask Ma how she was, when that famously penetrating voice began to speak.

“That thesis should have been
much more lurid
,” Philippa was saying to Pedro. “And she can't wear short skirts with those legs—look at her neck, though, and shoulders.”

“Very nice shoulders,” Pedro answered mildly.

“You knew the mother would be a trip,” Philippa went on, “but my god,
that dress
.” Her laugh went off wildly, like a champagne cork—a few more hours and she'd be free of me.

And though I hadn't yet asked my mother to explain her stumbled-up-from-a foxhole expression (she was placidly sipping punch but her eyelid had just twitched in a dangerous way), she began to tell me her story.

“The chicken is only the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “
He
doesn't think we should tell you.” (“He,” spoken with venomous disdain, was understood to refer to my father.)

And from there she dropped her series of little bombs:
(1)
ValuSpot, the largest retailer of ping-pong balls on the East Coast, had found a cheaper source and stopped buying from my father, so that
(2)
they'd been unable to keep up with the mortgage payments, complicated by the fact that
(3)
they actually held two mortgages on the house, one from the bank, and one from the teachers' credit union, which had caused
(4)
two lending institutions to foreclose on the house at once, which left
(5)
bankruptcy as the only choice and, on another subject entirely,
(6)
Ma had lost her teaching job after she wrote a love letter to one of her students—well, not a love letter, really, just a term paper comment that had gotten out of hand—she'd been trying to boost his self-esteem. They'd wanted her out, now they had their excuse.

“Motorcycles are the only thing he's good at, Beatrice,” she said (this “he” was spoken with aching devotion). “So of course, that's what he wrote about. He's not going to be a rocket scientist” (here she waved a hand vaguely in my direction as if I had discovered in Wilde's epigrams a coded formula for jet fuel) “but he
knows motorcycles
and I wanted to show him that's a worthwhile thing.”

They had to be out of the house by the end of the month, and oh, they were divorcing—this at least was a bit of good news. “Out on the street,” she wailed. “With three little children.”

She gazed at me pleadingly. Surely I, the graduate, would have the answer. She'd do whatever I told her, of course, and if it didn't work out she'd be furious. I suppose that's the wellspring of my character—I expect my words to have an effect, usually a pretty bad one.

Therefore I said absolutely nothing, and made a flurry of eye contact with Sylvie. We never felt so cozy as when we were shaking our heads together over their follies.

And I felt again that wave of excitement I'd had when I heard the tents go up—here it was finally, the catastrophe that had threatened us all those years, that we'd hidden from and dreamed of, worked against, though we prayed it would come. The lightning would strike, the house would burn to the ground, and with it every bond that held us to each other; we'd be free. A shiver ran through me. What next?

Sylvie said, by rote, “It's all going to work out, Ma.”

Fork poised, Teddy asked, “What
is
this?”

“Chicken,” we all said.

“It doesn't look like chicken. It looks disgusting.”

“It's creamed chicken, your favorite!” Ma said.

“No, it's not,” Teddy said. “Pizza's my favorite.”

“Your father likes pizza,” Ma said witheringly. “Creamed chicken is your very favorite dish.”

“It is?”

“Would I make up something like that?” she said, catching my eye as he poked his fork gingerly in.

Teddy looked at Sylvie, who nodded very wisely, so he tried a bite. And made a face.

“On your last birthday you
asked
to have creamed chicken,” Ma said. “I'm your mother, I know.”

He gave up, and began to eat, though without conviction. Olney and Dotsy floated by, she winding a ribbon around her finger and saying, “Well, it doesn't release until I'm twenty-five, so until then, I'm kind of on my own.”