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JANE RULE
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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For Avis Seads
Stories
Home Movie
The Day I Don’t Remember
The Puppet Show
Outlander
Miss Wistan’s Promise
Pictures
The Killer Dyke and the Lady
Lilian
In the Attic of the House
First Love/Last Love
Sightseers in Death Valley
A Perfectly Nice Man
Night Call
Essays
Sexuality in Literature
Teaching Sexuality
Private Parts and Public Figures
With All Due Respect
Homophobia and Romantic Love
Stumps
Letters
The Sex War
Fucking Pariahs on the Schoolroom Shelf
Closet-Burning
Reflections
Grandmothers
A Biography of Jane Rule
ALYSOUN CARR SAT AT a table in a street cafe in Athens drinking ouzo. Directly across from her, through an open window and onto a far wall, a home movie was being projected. A young couple grew larger on the wall. Suddenly the enormous head of a baby filled the whole window, as if it were going to be born into the street. Alysoun, careful in a foreign country never to make so melodramatic a gesture as to cover her eyes if she could help it, looked away. She added water to the ouzo and watched what had been clear thick liquid thin and turn milky. She did not like the licorice aftertaste, but she liked the effect, which was a gentling of her senses so that she could receive things otherwise too bright or loud or pungent at a level of tolerance, even pleasure. In another ten minutes, if the movie lasted so long, she could watch it without dismay.
At her own home, such a show could go on as long as an hour if absolutely everything her father had ever taken was resurrected for the occasion and supplemented by an ancient cartoon or two he’d bought for a forgotten birthday of one of the children. At least two of the films were always also shown backwards, causing a hysteria of giggles in which, at least for Alysoun, there was an element of alarm. It was daunting to see how without effort the projector could do what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not, the diver’s feet breaking the water and restoring him by impossible magnetism to the board, the child toppling up onto the chair “to keep the past upon its throne,” where did that come from? Another wall. The camera, particularly the movie camera, is reactionary. It doesn’t have to run backwards to prove its point. Alysoun always dreaded most the moment when her own baby face would fill the frame, and her father would say, “Well, you’re all good-looking kids, but Alysoun was the prettiest baby I ever saw.” Alysoun could never see why, a head with that little hair, offering up not a smile but a silent snort as if blowing a nose without a handkerchief directly into the camera. The remark could have made the others jealous if the past tense wasn’t emphasized as a rebuke. Her father seemed to see the process of her growing up as some horribly disfiguring disease or mortal accident. Only the camera could give him back that pretty baby who, snorting out at her adult self, made Alysoun feel as disoriented as if she had been physically dragged by the camera back up out of the water and onto the springing board. Others of her siblings had reproduced; Alysoun had not. Perhaps her father was only complaining that she hadn’t given him the pleasure a second time in life, a granddaughter about whom he could say, “She’s almost as pretty as her mother.” Only by having children were you allowed by such a parent to go on living in the present.
Alysoun looked back through the window at remarkably bad views of what might have been a flower garden. A film maker has no business trembling with awe before anything, but what ten minutes ago would have made Alysoun mildly nauseated now amused her. People talked about the universality of great art, but far more universal is the mark of an amateur, trapping all he loves in the cage of his own unpracticed seeing and letting it run backwards out of time. If she had watched long enough, surely a Greek diver’s feet would break the water, a Greek baby snort; but Alysoun could not wait. She was due at a rehearsal, and she had to stop at the hotel to pick up her instrument.
The walk back down the steep street, loud with Greek and aggressive automobiles, would dissipate the mild sedative her drink had been and leave her ready to do what she always did very well, whether alone or before an audience.
“Don’t you ever have stage fright?” her father demanded before her first important appearance with the San Francisco Symphony. For Alysoun to be able to go into the high calm she could always achieve when she was about to confront any music was, if not inhuman, shockingly insensitive for a woman.
She did not tell him that she was frightened of nearly everything else: what most people were afraid of, like getting on an airplane or meeting vicious dogs; what some people were afraid of, like sex or fortune-tellers; what no one should be afraid of, like eating or her father. She did not tell him because at the moment before a performance she did not have to be afraid of anything.
Everyone with whom she must play had practiced, as she had, for years, read from the same score, followed the same conductor. Together they were in agreement, in control of what happened. Having discovered that cooperative security very young, Alysoun never wanted to leave it for the reality outside music, at which she’d never known how to practice, for which there seemed to be neither agreed score nor conductor. Each time she played, she was inside that universal harmony toward which life and even the other arts struggled but only music achieved.
Only after the rehearsal, on her way to a midnight dinner, listening to flamboyant concertmaster say, “Such control! Such feeling! You play to my soul!” Alysoun wondered if she would vomit or faint in the street or burst into hysterical tears. More often, like tonight, she managed to control herself enough to make it to the restaurant, only to stare at a dinner no hunger could have forced her to eat, while the concertmaster protested at American vanity that made their women thin as even the poor would be ashamed to be in Greece.
“You are no bigger around than your own clarinet!”
The criticism was modestly reassuring; it meant her dinner partner was more offended by her skeletal thinness than attracted by the novelty of her blond hair, and she could soon go to her bed without argument.
“But she is famous even in her own country as the lady who does not eat,” said a young woman sitting across from Alysoun, who had been introduced as the sister to the first viola.
“How do you know that?” Alysoun demanded.
“I read about you at the American Information Center. I work for the Americans as a translator.”
There had been a hushed-up episode when, after one of her collapses, an ordinary doctor rather than a psychiatrist had been called. Instead of being diagnosed as an unfocused phobic for whom little could be done, or being told she suffered the absolutely normal anxieties of a career woman who should marry, stay home, and have a baby, she was informed that she was suffering from malnutrition. She went into the hospital to be fed intravenously until she could tolerate the sight of food. In the protected environment of the hospital, Alysoun had done very well. She put on ten pounds and left with the knowledge that, though she had not found a cure, she had found a retreat. Then her doctor, pleased, no doubt, with the shadow of breasts that could now be discerned under her blouse, feeling in a creative way responsible for them, asked her to marry him.
Alysoun had learned not to say in response that she didn’t like sex; it was too much of a challenge. None of her other real reasons was much help either, for men could easily delude themselves that, servile in pursuit, they could be servile masters. She had to invent her excuse.
“I not only read you do not eat but that you have a mysterious lover. Some say a great head of state, some say a reclusive millionaire,” sister to the viola went on, and her eyes, though not unfriendly, were disbelieving.
“I must try to get some sleep,” Alysoun said. “I haven’t got over the time change.”
Their immediate, effusive sympathy might have been a taunting protest, the way her throat soured. She was trembling.
“I will take you,” the young woman offered. “I have a car right there.”
“Thank you. I didn’t even catch your name.”
“Constantina. It must be dreadful for you, having to do this after every rehearsal, all over the world. Oh, they play like angels, I am the first to admit, but they eat like beasts and talk like men. Tomorrow night I’m going to kidnap you and take you somewhere quiet where you can have fresh fish and salad, and I will not talk to you or even look at you if you prefer. I hope you have forgiven me for gossiping about you to you, but it did stop them, yes?”
Because Constantina was concentrating on moments of inexcusable traffic, Alysoun could watch her throughout her monologue, a high, very white forehead against her dark hair and straight dark brows, a rather sharp nose, a very wide mouth with handsome white teeth. No one would call her pretty; no one would easily forget her face. She was about thirty, Alysoun’s own age.
“And lunch. May I take you to lunch? Before you decide, I warn you that it is because I want to make use of you, and I can tell by looking at you that you know what I need to know.”
“I know about nearly nothing but music,” Alysoun said.
“You know the names of flowers,” Constantina said.
“Yes,” Alysoun admitted.
“Then you must have lunch with me, as an official duty, a matter of good will between nations.”
“Thank you. I’d like that.”
In a strange bed, where she could be afraid of sleep in certain states of exhaustion, Alysoun wondered why such overt flattery had pleased rather than offended her, why she had responded so confidently about her knowledge of flowers when it was her habit always to deny anything that she could, to avoid being known, to avoid obligation. Enduring the endless novelty of anxieties was, if not easier, at least less humiliating alone. She could always resort to practicing, even just the fingering if other people might be disturbed. Something in Constantina’s confidence was specifically protective of Alysoun without a trace of inevitable male condescension; and Constantina had had the good sense to ask a favor, one it would give Alysoun pleasure to grant, for she had learned the names of flowers very early in her vocabulary, where they stayed certain and bright, a gift from her mother, who could forget the name of a child or neighbor but never the precise definition of a tulip or rhododendron or rose. In memory no film had ever picked from her, Alysoun, not much more than flower-high, walked with her mother naming the last of the Daffodils—Carlton, King Alfred—and the early tulips—White Triumphator, General de Wet. Naming was better than counting, which could start tomorrow night’s concert in her head. She was walking, nearly hidden in rhododendrons, saying, “Unique, Pink Pearl, Sappho …” when she slept. It was noon when she woke.
Constantina was waiting for her in the lobby, rose and came to her quickly, embraced her formally and stood back. “You have slept.”
“Yes, thank you, very well,” Alysoun said, “thinking of my mother’s flower garden.”
“Very good. I have a plan. We can walk, shall we? It is all right for you? It is not far, to the old Placa. We will have lunch, very simple, nothing much. Then we will do our work. We will go to the flower vendors. I will tell you the name of the flower; you will pick it out, and then the vendor will tell me its name in Greek.”
“What is this for?” Alysoun asked.
“Oh, I am translating a collection of Eudora Welty’s short stories for the American Information Center. They are full of flowers.”
Alysoun was grateful to have heard of Eudora Welty, remembered that she had read a story or two of hers but could not remember what.
“I am embarrassed not to know the flowers in Greek. When Yaya taught us, I had my head in a book,” Constantina confessed without guilt. “And they are not listed so particularly as I need in Greek-English dictionaries.”
Alysoun had to concentrate to hear what Constantina was saying because they were also negotiating the noon crowds along the narrow sidewalks, up onto which cars swerved without concern for pedestrians. Constantina had a cautious aggression Alysoun felt she could trust; so she followed, let her arm be taken, even allowed herself to be pushed ahead of Constantina until they escaped through a dark doorway and down a narrow hall. There had not been a sign Alysoun could see.
“How does anyone know this is a restaurant?”
“I don’t know. It’s just always been here, and we have always come to it,” Constantina said, directing her into a room of perhaps eighteen tables, two or three already taken by groups of men. “I am sorry we may be the only women here, but we will be left alone, and the food is safe for Americans. Shall I order for you?”
As in the car the night before, Alysoun had an opportunity to study Constantina’s face while she read the menu, behaving as if it were in a foreign language she must translate for herself. She had the kind of face that registered every small perplexity and pleasure but might be a busy mask for deeper moods and needs. When she had made a choice, she described it in detail to Alysoun, who agreed at once.
“You know, it’s not that I don’t like to eat. It’s just sometimes can’t.
“I understand. I understand exactly,” Constantina said. “One can feel such a victim to food.”
“Do you often have to take visiting Americans around?” Alysoun asked, for she knew how notoriously small Greek salaries were against their social obligations; the only country that was worse was Japan.
“Unfortunately, no. I am no one of importance, after all. I met you because my brother is kind to me, and he understood my urgency. He even allowed me to use his car. I do not want to sound like a schoolgirl. I have your record. I admire it very much, and you. That is enough of my confession. Are you who you are because you obeyed your parents’ wishes?”
“No,” Alysoun said. “Oh, they’ve come round by now, of course. And they might have come round sooner if I’d played the violin or the viola or the piano or even the flute.”
“Or the harp?”
Alysoun laughed and said, “That might have seemed to them a little excessive. And the clarinet isn’t as bad as the cello or French horn would have been.”
“I can hardly bear to watch a woman playing the cello myself. But what could be the objection to the clarinet?”
“It probably didn’t have to do with the instrument. I wanted to learn to play it because my best friend did. My father never liked influences on his children other than his own … or Mother’s, of course.”
“What was your friend’s name?”
“Bobby Anne. I haven’t thought of Bobby Anne in years!”
“How faithless you are, when she inspired your whole career!”
“But I discovered in the process that it was the clarinet rather than Bobby Anne I loved.”
“The true obsession is always work,” Constantina said.
“Do you know that?” Alysoun asked, surprised. “It isn’t really like a discipline at all. It’s much more like a habit, impossible to give up. Not that I want to give it up, but I don’t think I could. My father said it was giving me buckteeth just as if I were sucking my thumb. My brother started calling me Bugs Bunny. Even Mother thought I should have braces.”
“And you did?”
“No, as you can see. My music teacher said minor vanities had to be sacrificed, and I didn’t really care as long as I could go on playing, and that was before I even learned to like music.”
“You have beautiful teeth,” Constantina insisted. “How different it is for my brother. He is doing what my parents want. He never learned to like music. It is nothing but work, work, work; and he is bored—bored to his soul.”
“How terrible!”
“Yet he is loved, oh so loved! And they go on helping him.”
“Don’t they help you?” Alysoun asked. “Don’t they approve of what you’re doing?”
“No. Oh, they don’t mind so much now, but my father used to call English the devil’s tongue, probably because my mother speaks it well. I simply outlasted him. My greatest strength is my attention span. He finally just lost interest in his own objections and let me come to Athens … to keep house for my brother, of course.”
“Will you marry?”
“Never!” Constantina said. “My brother, he wants to marry, but I tell him incest is all he will ever be able to afford.”
“Do you have to live with him?”
“I don’t mind,” Constantina said. “He is a kind man, but one day when he does marry, I look forward to living alone … or with a friend.”
“A friend?”
“You have no lover,” Constantina stated, suddenly changing the subject.
“I like the way you make statements rather than ask questions. I let people think I do. It’s the only refusal that seems to make sense to anyone.”
“You have enjoyed your lunch.”
“Yes, I have, and, Constantina, I’d like to pay for it and for dinner, too. I have a generous travel allowance for this tour, thanks to the State Department, and there’s no reason for you …”
Constantina put a hand out to stop this attempt. “If I told you I had saved for months, looking forward; if I told you what a privilege … ?”
“If I told you I have such a horror of obligation that I usually refuse all invitations … ?”
“If I told you the waiter would judge me for failing in Greek hospitality … ?”
“If I told you …” Alysoun tried to continue, but she was laughing and could think of nothing more to protest.
“Come,” Constantina said, “and name me the flowers. Then I will be obliged to you.”
The crowds had thinned now, and they had no difficulty strolling arm in arm. Alysoun did not even care that they turned heads and inspired comments. Sometimes Constantina answered back at some length.
“What are you saying?”
“Sometimes I say, ‘Go home to your mother and kill a pig,’ sometimes much worse.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“It is nothing. It is like, in a village, saying ‘good afternoon.’ It is a circumstance where it is rude not to be rude. They are only admiring your hair.”
Alysoun, accompanied by a man, felt not so much protected as invisible, and she sometimes wondered if her need to vomit or scream was a fear not of the dangers of the street but of obliteration. With Constantina she had the odd, lighthearted sense of being conspicuous and safe.
When they arrived at the Placa, some of the flower vendors were closing their stands for the afternoon, but there were still at least a dozen open for business, displaying a remarkable variety of flowers.
“Of course, it’s May,” Alysoun reminded herself. “Greece is like California: absolutely everything blooms in May.”
“One story is set in San Francisco. She is describing the San Francisco flower stalls.”
“Give me your list.”
Looking down it, Alysoun had not seen quite that style of script before and realized Constantina must have learned to write English script once she was old enough to control it and form a conscious style of her own.
“What is the matter? Is it hard to read?”
“No, not at all. I was admiring it. It is very like you,” Alysoun said, aware that she was falling into Constantina’s habit of compliment.
There were thirty-six flowers on the list. At the first vendor, Alysoun found five of them: carnation, dutch iris, narcissus, begonia, gladiola; and when Constantina explained to the man what they were doing, he gave Constantina not only the Greek name but the flowers, itself and refused payment. With the second vendor, where Alysoun found another four—violet, sweet pea, anemone, amaryllis—it was the same. Soon all the vendors in the Placa knew what the women were doing and called out their specialties in hope of offering the rarer, the lovelier; but only when Alysoun actually saw what she wanted were the Greek names any use to them. The bouquet in Constantina’s arms grew larger and more absurdly various, fragrances of rose, iris, lily, a startlingly perfumed orange tulip, more pungent. In a short while they had twenty-five varieties of flowers, sometimes as many as half-a-dozen specimens. The vendors shouted in pleasure.
“Oh, it’s getting late,” Constantina said, in sudden distress, “and you must rest before the concert.”
“I’d forgotten all about the concert,” Alysoun confessed, but what would have been truer to say was that she had not needed to think about, consciously keep it in mind as a safe goal to get her through the anxieties of the day.
“A Eudora Welty bouquet,” Constantina said, her face disappearing into the blooms. “I am a little in love with her, too.”
“By now, so am I,” Alysoun said. “I wish we could send it to her or at least let her know. It must be odd to be a writer, never in the presence of the pleasure you give.”
At the hotel, they lingered a moment in the lobby.
“I’ve had such a lovely time,” Alysoun said.
“You must have the flowers.”
Alysoun began to protest; then instead she simply smiled and took them.
“I’ll come for you tonight after the concert,” Constantina said, and she was gone.
Alysoun went to her room and rang room service for a vase. The maid looked critically at the flowers and returned with three vases, but the flowers could not be separated. Alysoun chose the largest and began to arrange the bouquet Eudora Welty had called to life. Perhaps when Alysoun was through, she would actually sit down and write Eudora Welty a letter. Constantina would know her publisher. A tulip, deep purple enough to be called black, named Queen of the Night, was the color of Constantina’s eyes; an apricot rose the texture and color of her skin. Now walking along the street, she would be carrying the fragrance that filled this room. Alysoun imagined herself saying to Constantina that night, “If I could have a perfume made of this, I would wear it the rest of my life.” And some time after that Constantina would say, “You have loved a woman.” And Alysoun would say, “Yes, but such a long time ago she is even less real to me than Bobby Anne.” “How faithless you are!” And Alysoun would say …
Fear woke in her womb, feeling so like desire that if someone very loving, very skillful had been there at that moment to hold her, to touch her, she would not have resisted. Constantina.
“Dear Eudora Welty,” Alysoun began a letter she knew she would neither finish nor mail. “Perhaps it is as well you don’t know all the pleasure you give or the insight you bring. I have no idea whether you’ve ever written a story about this, but because of a bouquet of your flowers (I’ll explain what I mean about that in a minute) I’ve discovered that fear is desire, not shame or guilt or inadequacy or any of those other things. The question to ask about fear is not what are you afraid of but what do you want. If you know what you want and you can have it, then fear doesn’t seem like fear at all. …”
If Alysoun could walk out at the end of the concert tonight not betrayed back into the threatening loneliness of people who only moments before belonged to the same great affirmation of order and harmony and now had nothing to share but petty, conflicting appetites; if instead she were to be with Constantina, who read a menu like a score, who turned an afternoon into a bouquet of flowers, Alysoun might practice to live as she had learned to work, in the high calm of anticipation and presence.
She did not walk out for her solitary drink to watch a world behaving as if everyone were taking part in a home movie, jerky and self-conscious, to be projected over and over again so much larger than life on the flawed wall of childhood. She stayed alone and quiet in her room until it was time to go.
Alysoun Carr played that night as well as she had ever played in her life. Only when she was taking her bow was she aware of the cameras. The concert was being televised not only for the Greek audience but also for Americans who at that moment were watching her image by satellite on their television screens. Her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters would all be together, and for one dangerous second she was tempted to snort before, instead, she smiled her full, bucktoothed, professional smile through a rain of flowers her mother had taught her to name.
“YOU INVENT YOUR MOTHER to suit your own guilt!” I shouted. “She’s unreal.”
Jean, her back to me, knelt by the living room bookcase packing up Rubyfruit Jungle, Lesbian/Woman, Adrienne Rich’s essays. Beside her was a box already full of copies of Lesbian Tide, the Body Politic, Conditions. And this was only the beginning. It was the third visit in so many years her mother and much younger sister had made to the coast, the third time Jean had packed up all incriminating evidence of our life together. The first time I helped not only with the books and records but with the pictures, and we rearranged our clothes in the closets. I even put our toothbrushes as far from each other as possible in the holder. Orphaned at ten, I was without experience in tending the sensibilities of a mother, and I was, anyway, newly in love and awed by the experience. The second time I got sick, and Jean had to sleep with me whether anyone liked it or not. This time I was being resolutely combative.
“Do you hear me?” I demanded, sounding like somebody’s mother myself.
“You like my mother; my mother likes you. Kinky’s only fourteen …” Jean began, still going on with the witch-hunt through the shelves.
“Fourteen is old enough for the facts of life.” If I hadn’t known how offended Jean was by details of my boarding school initiation, I would have used my own experience. Instead I tried a trade-off. “I slept alone in a room full of crucifixes when we visited her house, and she’s not even Catholic.”
“But she had to raise us Catholic.”
“She said she didn’t mind that you didn’t go anymore. She said she’d kept her promise.”
“Karin, it would kill Mother.”
“I don’t believe it!” I shouted. “I believe you think it would kill you to admit I matter to you.”
“That’s not fair,” Jean said, giving me her full attention and judgment at the same time.
“Is this?” I asked with a gesture toward the boxes. “We’re not even illegal. We’re consenting adults.”
“For two weeks I also have to be my mother’s child.”
People deprived early of their mothers are supposed to keep looking for substitutes, but I am frankly embarrassed by any attempt to mother me. That didn’t stop me from feeling jealous of Jean, yea, and jealous of her mother, too. Though I was arguing for honesty, loyalty was the real issue. It was time Jean chose me above everyone else, particularly her mother.
“Well, I’m not your mother’s child, and I’m not going to lie to her anymore.”
I hadn’t expected Jean finally to give in. Never having had to come out to a mother myself, I couldn’t really imagine how Jean would do it. I just needed to rage around enough for her to know how I felt. Her suggestion that I leave took me totally by surprise. The line went over and over again in my head every day: “Then maybe you’d better find some place to stay. …”
What if I’d gone on arguing as if what she had said were no worse than her packing up the books? Or what if I’d admitted I was pushing her too hard and actually right then apologized? I was so taken aback I simply asked, “Do you mean that?” And she said, “Yes.”
I didn’t pack much. Actually, as I looked around, there wasn’t much in the place that belonged to me. Jean’s the one to buy things; I’m more apt to spend money on dinners out, weekends away. We’d been here three years, and I was only now noticing that it didn’t look like our place at all. It was Jean’s, and she was ordering me out of it, just a week before Christmas.
I should have quit my job and left town, gone somewhere I didn’t know anybody or taken one of those cruises gay travel agents are always advertising. Only strangers would have patience for my load of anger and self-pity. But I didn’t. I slept on one friend’s couch until her mother arrived. I drank myself out of welcome at another’s. On Christmas Eve I put myself up for grabs at the Crossroads and got the kind of sexual punishment I was probably looking for. I don’t remember Christmas day.
I don’t even know what day after that it was—Sunday, I guess, because I wasn’t at work—I spent hours walking along the beach. Though Jean’s mother was the only argument we’ve ever had that I had lost, I knew the ten days behind me were strewn with similar defeats once Jean had an opportunity to discover and label them. As one of my erstwhile friends had crudely pointed out, I had been shitting in my own front yard.
“Let her try being holier-than-thou!” I shouted.
“Are you going back then?” the same friend asked.
I didn’t know what to answer. I hadn’t thought. Trying to, I wasn’t sure I had that option now. Once I was suspended from school and behaved with so little repentance that I went back to find myself expelled. Why hadn’t I told Jean to leave? She had a house full of crucifixes, a mother and a sister to go home to. My ex-guardian was an uncle who sent me a perpetual subscription to the New Yorker and let the bank deal with the rest. Maybe I should have spent Christmas in the vault.
I should have got Jean Tee Corinne’s Cunt Coloring Book to open on Christmas morning, and let her figure out how to be her mother’s child after that! They weren’t even my books and records she was hiding. They were her own. That was the sort of stupid hypocrite she was, and I was at least going to go back and tell her so.
Jean’s mother and Kinky always left the morning of New Year’s Eve. The first year, after we drove them to the airport, we spent the rest of the day in bed and didn’t make it to the party we had planned to go to. The second year I was already in bed, and Jean spent the day cleaning and putting everything back in place, the evening playing Olivia records and saying she was sorry. We both were. This year I turned up around three in the afternoon. I left my suitcase in the car. I rang the bell.
“Have you lost your key?” she asked when she opened the door.
“No,” I said.
I was going to go on to say I didn’t feel as if I lived here anymore, but it all looked so familiar, books and magazines in place, so ordinary and real, that I asked instead, “When did they leave?”
“The day after they got here,” Jean said.
“What?”
“I told them,” Jean said.
“Why? Why did you do a crazy thing like that?”
“It’s what you wanted me to do.”
“But not without me, not without figuring out how so—you know—they wouldn’t mind.”
“I guess I didn’t care by then whether they minded or not,” she said, sounding not angry so much as resigned.
“What did she say? What did your mother say?”
“Nothing much. That Kinky was still her responsibility. In Dad’s memory, she couldn’t accept or condone … that sort of thing. Just what you’d expect.”
“Why didn’t you let me know? Why didn’t you call me at work?”
“I don’t know,” Jean said.
“What did you do for Christmas?”
“Nothing.”
“Why?”
“I knew what you were doing.”
“I can’t remember the day at all,” I said, and it couldn’t have sounded like an alibi.
“Well,” Jean said, “here’s all your mail.”
I started to open it, not knowing what else to do. Christmas cards seemed horribly beside the point. It could have been March or April. Then I came to the most recent New Yorker cover, a reindeer with birds in its antlers.
“Christ!” I said, and I could feel Jean, the ex-Catholic, flinch. “As out-of-key with the season as I am.”
She didn’t laugh. I felt more inappropriate than ever. “What do you need me to say?”
After a moment, she said, “It’s what I need unsaid.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because you were right.”
I was surprised into a hope that I might be allowed to be self-righteous all over again, but something about the way Jean held her shoulders warned me not to capitalize on it.
“I could have been more tactful,” I said.
“Why did you leave?”
“You said you meant it.”
“Maybe I did. But I was very sorry—too sorry. I more or less threw Mother and Kinky out, too.”
I was sorry, too, but I hadn’t been here to live through it with her. Anything I did or said would make it worse rather than better. What if I said, “You know, I wasn’t being honest; I was being jealous”? Jean would just be sorrier than ever.
“Why do you always believe me?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. Tell your next lover not to believe a word you say.”
“You, too,” I said. “And tell her …”
But I had no advice, even angry. If there had been less room for me when Mom (I did call her “Mom”) and Kinky were around, their absence left no room for me at all. Crowding in instead were these two new lovers between whom the reconciliations would have to take place. Jean and I had got past forgiving or skipped it, maybe on that Christmas Day she sat alone refusing to phone, the day I don’t remember.
I ASSUMED IT WAS a tragedy, my husband having other women. I told him that it made me feel like a thing. Actually I’d felt like a thing for months, for years before I got hold of that reason for it and could stop feeling guilty and start feeling righteously indignant. I was not to blame. He was. They were: sweet declension of the verb to be, which right away gave me a small but new measure of self-respect. That’s too strong a word for it. The space between a wrong woman and a wronged woman is very small, but I could draw breath, enough to ask for a divorce. He’d been home so little, he hardly knew he had a child, except for the bills he paid at the end of the month; and he was willing to go on being that kind of a father. He knew I could go back to work.
I grew up a planner, not a thinker. Ideas were fine as long as they didn’t get in my way, which I wanted to be as clear in the world as it was in my head. I was going to be a nurse so that I could marry a doctor, to have three children, the third both a status symbol and an insurance policy in case an incompetent baby-sitter boiled or drowned or broke one while I was away at a medical convention with my husband. The first year in college, I had a roommate named Bobo, who brooded over courses in philosophy, literature, political science, anthropology, sociology, complaining the while that they were all simply “man’s frail systems of defense.” Why bother with them then, I wanted to know. What use were they? What did she want out of life? “To understand,” Bobo said. I thought that was hilarious. She didn’t laugh about my taking golf and tennis and sailing as seriously as I did chemistry, but she wanted to discuss the difference between “outer and inner direction.” “In means down in my book,” I said. “Out means up.” Once she asked me, “Are you really at all interested in sick people?” As if I should have a social preference for them in order to be a nurse! Nobody is interested in sick people, least of all their relatives and lovers. Look at all those TV shows, even the news. People are almost as interested in what you go to bed with as who you go to bed with; and what you die of is probably more interesting than who you married. That’s not an idea; that’s a fact. Bobo was shocked by it. I wasn’t. I wanted to be a nurse to marry a doctor to have three kids, and that was enough for me, along with the golf and sailing and tennis.
There were students like Bobo in nursing, too, not so kind and kinky, but humorless and critical, first of the courses, then of the hospital, head nurses and doctors. That type never bitched about the patients, but they didn’t last long either, went out with wrenched backs because some three-hundred-pound glutton had as much right to be free of bedsores as the next guy, went out in social protest because some half-dead alcoholic didn’t get priority in kidney treatment, went out because they couldn’t stand to know how ugly people can be in pain, how hard and pointless dying is. I didn’t like some of it myself, but I wasn’t surprised about having to put up with being bored or terrified or sick to my stomach or sorry as part of the job.
I was shocked to find out that being bored and terrified and sick to my stomach and sorry were part of being married, too. I wonder if Bobo had been around at the time to ask me, “Are you really at all interested in this man?” I’d have thought that was as irrelevant a question as being interested in sick people. He was a doctor. And for him? I was a tough little nurse who knew the realities of life, the endless dirty joke of the body, that flesh puppet of the trade, manipulated for the mastery of it, set aside and forgotten, whether it finally broke down or mended. Being married was like being a chronic patient, needing the same operation performed three or four times a week, a mortal bore for a doctor whose only variety in work is new flesh each time which might occasionally present surprises.