The Bride of Catastrophe (46 page)

She was discharged from the hospital. They said she was fine. Except for the blinding headaches, the strange slow heartbeat, and the loss of all hearing in the ear that had been pressed to the phone.

*   *   *

“
LICHTENSTEIN'S FERNS,
they're called. The filigree pattern on a lightning victim's skin, I was
just
reading about it, Beatrice.
Literally
, this was
yesterday
. Listen, they follow the perspiration, that's how it happens.”

Philippa had to be given credit here, for adding fuel to a drama by
reading
. “I'd love to really see it. Do you think your father's got a picture? And what was she doing on the phone in an electrical storm?”

“I don't know. You can't blame me!” I said. (Though of course, if I hadn't been conceived and refused to be miscarried, if I hadn't abandoned them for college when I knew they couldn't manage, nor been such a disastrous surrogate mother to Dolly…)

“You have to admit it's odd,” she said, laughing. “I mean, how often do I make a special trip to the library to research the effects of lightning strikes? How often have I done that? There is
obviously
a connection here.”

“You're right!” I cried, because Philippa loved to hear this, and because it was so, so comforting to believe that while my family was dialing for thunderbolts, Philippa was studying them, getting it all figured out.

“When did it happen?”

“Around four.”

“That is
exactly
when I was in the library,” she said. “I was reading that the highest incidence of lightning strikes is in the late afternoon and I looked up at the clock and—how extraordinary, Beatrice.
Little
did I know.”

*   *   *

“
OH, THE
doctor can't get a word in edgewise,” Sylvie told me. “
You
know how they are. Ma wants to be sure Pop gets blamed for it all. He wants to prove the doctors don't know everything…”

She took a deep drag on her cigarette and laughed, awfully huskily for a girl of seventeen. “On the plus side, Ma's eviction seems to have been staved off,” she said. “You can imagine it, can't you?

“‘Your honor, I have noplace to go, I've been abandoned by my husband, my daughter is lying in a coma, and
this man
wants to evict me, turn us all into the street.'”

Springtime was barking wildly, a high-pitched little yap. “God, I just took him out,” she said. “No, Springy, you're going to wake baby Jesse up. No. Shhh,” she said, to no avail. “Okay, okay, wait a minute, Bea.” I heard the front door squeak open and then silence, and she came back and said, “All right, now everyone's happy.”

Then she was screaming, and I heard her fly out the door screaming “No, no, no,” and a furious, snarling chaos, and she came back and wailed into the phone, “Beatrice, Beatrice, they killed him, they tore him apart.”

“Call the police!” I said. “Call the police, and get out of there!” but Springtime was dead, and she was sobbing as if she'd lost her whole family, and I was a hundred miles away on the other end of the phone.

*   *   *

THE POLICE
came and shot the neighbor's dogs, and the next day they came back to search the trailer. The neighbor had told them Butch was selling cocaine.

“They're going to take the baby, Beatrice, I'm afraid they'll take the baby away.”

“Sylvie, what do you mean? Who?”

“Butchy is clean, Beatrice! He'd never do anything like that. The cops have it in for him, that's what it is.”

“Sylvie, what happened?”

“They came in the middle of the night,” she said. “He had some dope—joints rolled up in the drawer—maybe five or six. Bea, he likes to have a couple tokes every once in a while, the way some guys have a beer.”

“Where is he?”

“Police station,” she said.

I heard the baby crying—a persistent rasp like the sound of a rusty hinge. She picked him up and the cries became louder, frantic, as if the baby had just realized what kind of life he was facing.

“I won't let them take him, that's all,” she said, with that forlorn toughness I'd come to expect from her, but she began to cry again, so deeply. All this time, she'd been winding the rope for her own noose—and she was surprised to find herself swinging from it now? But seventeen-year-olds do that—generally it means they end up losing a driver's license, not a child.

“It's my fault,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I shouldn't have called them, about the dogs. Oh, I wish I didn't do it, Beatrice! I wasn't thinking, and it's a violation of parole!”

Eight

S
TETSON DROVE
us to the bus station to get the Pride Charter to New York—ninety lesbians in lavender—a beautiful thing. I could barely sit still in my seat—the parade would start at the Stonewall, where
everything
had started, where we (that's right, finally I was part of a great, vital tradition) fought back against oppression and set off on the road to equal rights. Grace Jones was going to sing at the rally in Central Park. Pat came up the aisle with an air of immense self-importance; Susan behind her was wearing a T-shirt with a peace sign/woman's symbol on it. The men were taking a different bus, which caused a stir as we debated whether we'd been excluded.

“Honestly, didn't we get into this so we could escape from men?” someone said, and I answered with asperity. “No, we got into this because we loved
women
.”

“Please,”
Lee said under her breath, and faced forward sharply. “Do not make a scene.”

From behind us someone said: “They're our brothers, but they don't welcome us.”

And someone else reminded her that it had been decided there would be no male children allowed on our bus.

“That's different,” Pat explained. “We are asserting our right to our own lives and bodies.”

“But to pay for babysitting…” someone said, “when it would be a good lesson for them to see us, to recognize right from the beginning that this is wrong…”

We were cozy together, huddled away from the hateful forces outside. We
knew
everyone despised us and that made our hearthfire blaze all the higher. I'd not been so snug since the last thunderstorm I'd spent in the linen closet with my mother. The world was divided into two camps:—people who killed defenseless animals for fur, dumped toxins into reservoirs, and hated lesbians; and those of us who were sensitive to the myriad needs of the world and hated no one, absolutely no one, except those people in the first group.

The bus started and Stetson waved, looking forlorn, I thought—left behind, all alone. I blew him a kiss. (I'd come to transgress.)

Someone started a chant and, clapping, stamping, we pulled onto the highway and out of poor little Hartford toward the real city.

“I'm hyperventilating,” Lee said.

“Okay, okay. Breathe nice and slow,” I said. “I'll count with you.”

“There,” she said. “That's better.” She squeezed my hand. “What would I do without you?” she asked.

She'd have stayed home, and felt fine. Instead, two blocks into the march, she sank onto a doorstep and said she couldn't go any farther. “It's a virus,” she said, “the nausea, ooof.” I rubbed her back. A man went by wearing an enormous ostrich feather fan on his penis and nothing else, thrusting as if to fuck the whole world. Colonies strutted past, shouting out their pride—proud to be gay, proud to be bi, proud to ride motorcycles—What would Cyril have thought? I wondered.

“Tens of thousands of amazing lesbians, seas of them,” I wheedled, with the sinking sense of how alike they—we—all looked, how exactly we'd fit ourselves to the mold. So righteous in our unconventionality; so perfectly the same. “We don't want to miss that.”

Lee's panic attacks had eaten further and further into her life until she didn't dare take a plane trip or ride in an elevator, and if we tried to go out to a friend's house, she'd end up bent double with stomachache and have to be taken home. Also, she'd become acutely self-conscious, so that she sometimes seemed to be performing a mocking pantomime of whatever she meant to be doing—mincing between her plants as she watered them, or washing the windows with large, unnatural strokes. She was trying with all her might to act like the person I wanted her to be, but when she tried to speak, her mouth would go dry suddenly. Her anxious voice quivered in my mind all day, saying: “You won't go down to Washington Street, will you?” “You'll call, when you get there? You'll keep the door locked? You'll be home before dark?” Once we went swimming at the Y together and she cried out in alarm when she saw me swim toward the deep end of the pool.

The transsexuals, pre-op and post-op, pranced by. They dressed as if they were turning themselves not into women but dolls. What, I wondered, would make a society think its fantasies
ought
to come true? What if people dared speak out the desires of their hearts as fully as those of their bodies? Still, the transsexuals knew how to carry themselves—
they'd
show
us
a thing or two about women! Lee pawed through her purse for the little pink pills the doctor had prescribed for her palpitations, and took one with a gulp, leaning against my shoulder.

“That's a little better,” she said.

I was beginning to feel a great sympathy with, of all people, men. Why hadn't I been grateful to those boyfriends when they leapt up from the bed and rushed to the ball field or the library or whatever arena of striving and conquest was furthest from the foggy tide basin of female feeling? If not for men's ridiculous qualms, I'd have stuck right to them, lovely, sticky creature that I was, so partial to those long looks, long kisses, long, long afternoons of ardent dishevelment, after which I could rest amidst the tangled bedclothes in the satisfied exhaustion of one who has been most deeply, fully, properly used. I'd have married any one of them, with my arms open, my heart open, my mind open as a sieve. Thank God they had done me the favor of resisting, letting me live a little longer before I folded myself into someone else. Lee loved me as completely as I could have hoped, and I was stuck like a sparrow on the lime twig of comfort, beside her. The parade passed by, traffic surged in behind it, and I hailed a cab for Central Park.

What a day! Frisbees sailed above us. Men strutted in leather harnesses. Women caressed each other's naked breasts in the sun. And here was Grace Jones, tall as a man, sleek as a woman—she looked as if a committee of gay men had designed her, like the huge golden Oscar statue at the Academy Awards. Everything stopped; we stood at attention, she took the microphone, and into it she snarled transcendently:
“I need a maa-aa-an.”

Faces froze, the women near us looked to each other for guidance. Was this a slap? Was it all right? We looked around—what should we do? She had been named Entertainer of the Year by the Gay Congress of the City of San Francisco. We applauded, but our smiles showed mostly consternation.

Back home the song rang in my ears as Lee and I tried to make love in honor of Gay Pride Day: it seemed the hardest work I'd ever done. I always had to remember to touch her gently—though the delicate little caresses she wanted would have driven me up the wall—but now I could barely keep myself from hurting her. I bit her shoulder, as if a bolt of pain would awaken her, engage something passionate, but she said, “Now, no biting,” like a coy kindergarten teacher remonstrating with a child. I ran my hands roughly over her, wanting to take her like a lump of clay and wrench her into some more satisfying form. Her nipples tasted as bitter as iron—
I hate you
, I thought, but I managed to make myself call her darling.

After she fell asleep I went out to the living room to read
Middlemarch
, and watch Dorothea struggle to properly love her husband, to honor him even after his death. She was conscious of everything, examining all the moral questions, striving to live up to her beliefs
and
her promises, even when they ran counter to each other. The promises I had made to Lee clanged in my mind suddenly like all the church bells in a mad city, drowning out everything else. I closed the book and set it on the parsons table, and Philippa's voice spoke in my thoughts as clearly as if I were sitting in her classroom. She was quoting George Eliot: “There was not room enough in poor Rosamond's mind for furniture to look small in it,” reminding us how tender Eliot was toward her characters and all their mistakes.

One small thing became clear to me just then: Philippa Sayres was the closest I had to kin. I tiptoed into the kitchen for the phone.

*   *   *

“
WHAT DO
you mean, you're in love with me?” She laughed, after my lugubrious confession. “It is
most
unlikely, Beatrice! You're in love, I don't doubt it, it's in your nature.” Here she laughed in tipsy appreciation: “But with me? Me? I really don't think so, Beatrice, no. You're onto
some
thing, though, something…” She paused to parse this latest feeling, and after a moment in which I could imagine her consulting her inner oracle, she said, “Yes! That's it! You need to go to graduate school!”

“Graduate school?”

She was paying me a compliment, in her own idiom. She saw me (oh, I did love her) as a dashing figure, and so accorded me her highest honor. To Philippa, scholarship was a fine steed for a good joust, and she welcomed me into the battle. She'd been my knight on a white horse, no question.

“What would I study?” I asked her.

“Goodness, Beatrice, surely you can figure out
something
for yourself,” she said. “Listen, I can't talk,
Gone With the Wind
is on.”