As I enter town I pass a field overgrown with tall weeds, gaunt brown stalks and still living grass, strewn with broken bricks, cinder blocks, aluminum cans, pop and beer bottles, rotting trash. A man who must be a professor strides briskly across the field, taking a shortcut toward the street that leads to the university. He trots along carrying a black umbrella tightly furled and swung like a walking stick. Under his arm is tucked a leather attaché case. Among the broken bricks and strewn condoms and mudholes he swings along evenly to his one o’clock class. Perhaps he is running over his lecture in his head, for he does not even see me. He reaches the sidewalk on the far side of the garbage jungle, striding along the neat residential street without altering his pace. I smile as I fall in behind him. What class do I belong to? His or Kemp’s? To whom is my loyalty due? I am a creature of this vacant lot, like those I grew up playing in, but even this one is no doubt due to be built on soon in this prosperous and ever-expanding city. In my pocket I carry Donna’s liberation.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
IN THE SNOW KING’S PALACE
THE ABORTION IS performed in a house that is a clinic inside, clean and efficient. The catch is that because of the illegality, no anesthesia is used. It is an operation done raw, Donna cut open and feeling every stroke. The doctor, unusually kind, permits me to remain in the room. Donna holds my hand. When he is finally done with the D and C, my hand is bleeding.
This doctor is also unusual in that he has the patient wait and recover on his premises to make sure no complications seem likely. Donna is put to bed in a small upstairs room, in pain but happy. I sit by the side of the bed, giving her my uninjured hand. She is bleeding heavily but at peace. As I watch her, I feel a sense of victory. Even with her being in pain, locked in like prisoners, unable to use the phone, this is the best our time has to offer.
Buhbe had twelve children and at least five abortions; Mother three children, at least two abortions and a miscarriage that almost killed her —doctors can’t help you when you’re miscarrying until the fetus is out, for fear of being an accomplice to abortion. My buhbe, my mother and their sisters always chose illegally and dangerously which of the endless possibilities for fecundity they would bring to birth, which of the multitude of possible children they might feed, clothe and love. So women have always done, in all societies everywhere, with or without male knowledge or aid, with or without the help of official medicine and law. Such was the province of midwives and witches.
Buhbe was born into hunger and danger and sailed in steerage into poverty and danger. Survival was an end in itself. Yet what a storyteller she was, carrying like seeds in a watermelon stories of the vanished past, of history burnt down, of the murdered and lost, the dense maddening lore of the shtetl.
Mother was born into trouble. After I was pregnant that first and only time, she taught me to touch my womb and tell what time of my cycle I’m in, how close to ovulation, how close to my period; she also taught me that a menstruating woman turns fermenting wine sour and that cats understand everything you say about them. One of those dicta is a superstition.
Sometimes I see her as a blood sacrifice to the ordinary confines of working-class life for a woman, robbed not only of her teeth but her chance to live out the hunger, the vitality, the rich imagination and passion in her. I am one strand in a fabric of women, Donna and Theo and Stephanie and Alberta and many others as dear or dearer to me who do not fit into the particular pattern of this story but live with their lives stitched to mine. Were I pointing out a different pattern in this crazy quilt, it would be their stories I would tell you as another story of my living.
“I’m bleeding … rather heavily,” Donna says tentatively.
The blood is running out so fast that I summon the nurse. The nurse gives her an injection and props her legs up. Finally the flow lessens. I am profoundly grateful to them for not sending us out where she would bleed in the street. I know what happens if you go into a hospital emergency room bleeding from the uterus. It is like going in with a gunshot wound; the criminal aspects come first and the medical treatment second, if then. I know how rare this doctor is to do follow-up care.
He does not release us until the end of the day. The co-op presents a more difficult situation. Normally we might have toughed it out like Wanda when she had her abortion and announced it, but if Peter is to be kept ignorant, nobody else must know. Donna has the stomach flu. Rosellen and I take turns nursing her. By Friday she is up, her face a dead chalky hue but more animation in her eyes than I’ve seen in weeks.
Friday afternoon she comes upstairs to my room and hugs me as I sit at my desk. I am startled. She has given herself permission at last to touch me. When she comes into the room she kisses me, and she kisses me when she leaves. They are dry soft kisses but kisses of affection. She never touches anyone but Peter, and I doubt if they walk entwined. Lennie was probably the only physically warm person she has ever been with—except for me, who hardly counts since till now I have been forbidden expression. I respond timidly, accepting these sudden offerings like flowers out of the snow that has begun to fall, large damp white circles like dogwood blossoms floating down and resting everywhere with an air of delicate surprise.
I want to be loved, I drink it in, but it feels fragile, born of the surcease of fear. When I wash my hair Saturday before supper, she insists on putting it up. As she does elaborate things with her curlers, I suffer the twisting and piling and the session under her hair dryer.
“You have dramatic features,” she tells me. “I’m a canvas I paint a face on. But you should play up your darkness.”
“Absolutely,” Stephanie says from the rocking chair, where she observes with a mixture of jealous alarm and curiosity. She has told me she thinks Donna wants me back as a roommate. I assure her I have no intention of moving out. I am tired of that drama of living together and not living together and almost convinced that we have grown closer without the constant bickering over mine and yours and who used what and left it how.
“Jill takes all the wrong tack with men,” Stephanie says, applying orange polish to her toenails. “Instead of waiting to see what a man wants, you tell him who you are.”
“If someone can’t know me and still love me, let him clear out.” I am annoyed. Where her robe slips I see a red love bite on her shoulder. The insult lies as much in her blunt instruction as in her assumption of superior firepower.
“You have to be honest,” Donna says loyally, who has just spent a month lying to Peter. “We both believe in the primacy of communication. Making love is a form of dialogue.”
“Oh? In French?” Stephanie snorts. “You know how to get round Jill, all right. You just agree with her silly moral notions.”
“I believe in acting clearly.” Donna handles my hair roughly with the effort of keeping her temper. “Our acts embody our values.”
“Acts? Like scratching myself? Brushing my teeth?” Stephanie jams the cap back on the polish bottle crooked.
“Why are you in such a bad mood?” In part they are pleasantly fighting over my platonic favors, but I think Stephanie is upset. “What gives with you?”
“Howie’s going to medical school at Columbia.”
“Sure. He likes New York. Columbia’s a good school. And it’ll put some space between him and his family. He needs to be farther away.”
“But I have too many incompletes to graduate. I’ll have to finish up in the fall.”
“Do you care about your degree?”
“My father would kill me. Howie says I have to get it. He doesn’t want to get married till I graduate,” she wails, scowling at her fresh orange nails. “My feet! They’re funny-looking and yellow.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I know what she’s afraid of.” Donna adds another layer to her construction and nails it in place with a mock tortoiseshell comb. “When your guy is living someplace else, he’s meeting other women—at work, every time he goes to a friend’s house. If you aren’t
on the spot, he’s fair game.”
Over my piled-up hair they grin at each other, sharing a moment of comradeship while I suffer a sense of being another species.
What Donna has wrought on my hair certainly makes me look older. I hardly dare nod or sneeze for fear of its all tumbling down. Tonight PAF debates free speech on campus. The university screens lecturers. We’re always getting our wrists slapped for desiring outside speakers. But under this debate another is surging. Hungary, Hungary, the betrayal of the Left, revolution, counterrevolution, anarchism, bourgeois liberties, nationalism, imperialism, they’re worse than us, they’re as bad as us, they’re all there is, they’re irrelevant. The speeches on responsible leadership in loco parentis ring false. People contradict each other nastily. It feels as if we are falling apart from an invisible center that has rotted out.
Tonight after the forum there is no party. Somehow no one arranged it this week. I end up at Gerrit’s apartment by default. The time has come to make this attraction real or dismiss it. Bolognese, Gerrit and I sit in Gerrit’s tidy kitchen. Die Deutsche Ideologie lies on the dish rack with a knife marking his place. Bolognese leans all the way back in his chair. Gerrit sits loosely forward, his elbows resting on the table, as we drink coffee I made.
“The truth is, the better students are always displeased by their education,” Gerrit is saying. “They complain it’s too hard, but it’s never hard enough.”
“Bullshit,” Bolognese says. “We don’t want it harder, we want it truer. We want dialogue, but we’re just statistics on a curve.”
“You think you don’t crave answers?” Gerrit sits up almost straight so I know he has thought of something he is going to enjoy saying. “What we all want from our education is to be one on one with Socrates. We all want to be fucked by Socrates.”
“I bet you wouldn’t, actually,” I say. “The ugly disreputable old geezer. A lower-middle-class failure who only flirted, then went home to his bag of a wife. You’re thinking about Plato. The poetic young man of good family and interesting attitudes.”
Gerrit is looking at me, eyes glowing with interest. He likes me when I am his good, good student. Why doesn’t Bolognese go home? Am I allowed to seduce Gerrit or forbidden? I want Gerrit to save me from Kemp and my taste for low adventure. Gerrit, make books as exciting as my underworld journeys. You’re a moral man: make me moral too.
I waver. I want to take Gerrit’s handsome leonine head between my hands and waken him to my potentialities with a kiss, not one of those chaste dry-lipped pecks he gives me in his car when he is about to deliver me to my house like a penny into a piggy bank. A moment later I want things simple. I want to be his student/friend/comrade as unambiguously as Howie and Bolognese are, without sexual vibrations to trouble the air. He started pursuing me, but only to a point where I hang flapping idly like a newspaper caught on a fence.
Finally Bolognese leaves, but only after Gerrit has dropped a few hints that the hour is late. Is he going to take me back immediately? He doesn’t. Instead we sit on the couch. With his head in my lap, I pet his hair like a cat’s fur while his feet in hand-knit argyle socks hang over the far arm. His mother knits them. She also knits him sweaters, mufflers and an afghan that covers his bed instead of a spread. He is his mother’s darling boy, the oldest, brightest son in a family of five. His father is a corporation lawyer. I suspect his family has almost as much money as Peter’s but he cares less. It never occurs to him he is not important and successful in himself. He lays his head in my lap and soaks up female attendance and adoration without ever considering that this is not a service provided by the city like water, I think, but I am still charmed.
A. You cannot easily seduce a man who does not touch you. If I sat down suddenly in his lap, he would assume I had mistaken him for a chair.
B. He does not get drunk. He drinks wine only to the point of an even greater ease of the tongue.
C. I could ask him. Hey, Gerrit, you wanna? Want to what? You must define your terms. Nowhere in any staged miniature drama in my head, one-act revue, can I say, Hey, Gerrit, want to fuck? I am too respectful. To put anything into such blunt words would alter our delicate rapport. Gerrit, do you love me? Of course he doesn’t; I myself suffer only from a four-year crush.
D. Hey, Gerrit, I’m in love with Howie, so let’s go to bed so I don’t mess up with him and Stephanie. That lacks appeal.
At the moment what I want is to get him to pay attention to me: intellectual attention. Maybe I want the answers he accuses students of longing for. Tell me how to put my life in order. Show me how to be just and political. “Sometimes I don’t know where I belong,” I say, thinking of Kemp’s shack, which is so much more comfortable to me than this apartment. “If I belong anywhere.”
“Anomie,” he murmurs. “The center doesn’t hold. Invisible stresses. Unresolved contradictions. A bridge stands until one day it falls into the river, that bridge in Puget Sound, suddenly we think, but the stresses were built into the design.”
“Other people my age know what they want. They want X other person and they want to marry X and have three children and live in Bloomfield Hills. They want to earn so many thousand a year and have two specific cars and a specific model boat and a summer home on one of two lakes.”
“They’re just deferring the discovery that you cannot define yourself by things you own and surround yourself with.”
“But I have to belong somewhere. I get scared. I don’t fit into anything. What can I join myself to?”
“But the price of joining, of belonging. The price!” He frowns up at me. “You were close to Alberta.”
“Still am.” Astonishing. He mentioned her name of his own free will.
“She talked to you about her life?”
“You, you mean, or her life otherwise?”
“And her family?”
“Mostly her father. But yes, her family.”
A silence. Then, “I wanted to be sure…. I never joined. Maybe I’m too bourgeois. Too attached to the intellectual freedom I prize which Ralph—Alberta’s father, did you ever meet him?—calls the candy with which petit bourgeois intellectuals are bought off. The power, he’d say, to publish radical academic papers no one reads and write all the jargon you please as long as nobody can understand it who works in a factory.”
He never joined what? Then I know what I halfway guessed. Alberta’s father and mother are in the Communist party. “Well, aren’t you glad now you didn’t join?”
“After Hungary? Yet I don’t feel spared any disillusion. Spared some sense of complicity, perhaps, but perhaps not. I wonder if I just refuse to take any chances—do you think so?”
“Without you there wouldn’t be any PAF and thus no progressive presence on this campus not closeted or tiny and sectarian.” I am deeply flattered by the question. Oh, give me your intricate and beautifully constructed Wasp conscience to handle reverently. I won’t hurt it.
“But is it enough?”
That seems a rhetorical question and I wait him out.
After a while he mumbles, “I feel guilty about her tonight. As if I ought to be comforting her. I know how she’ll hate what’s happening and yet feel wholly supportive of her father.”
“You could call her.”
He snorts. “I’m sure her phone is tapped.”
“You could say you’re thinking about her. You could say that with the FBI listening. Really. If they watch her, they know you were involved.”
“They used to follow us sometimes. She had her first scary experience with them when she was twelve…. Should I really call her?”
“She might not be home,” I offer. “Why not try?”
After another ten minutes of debate he goes into his bedroom and shuts the door. I hear the murmur of his voice. Half an hour passes while I read his latest Dissent. There’s a great article by C. Wright Mills. By the time Gerrit emerges, I have lost my desire to seduce him. Any strong reminder of Alberta’s feeling for him turns me off. He l
ooks as if he had been pummeled into some kind of feeling, and we start where we had left off, trying to talk about how we each feel about the Communist Party of America and its clandestine embattled glamour. I spend the night, but on his couch.
Saturday afternoon in January. Yesterday snow sifted down and today the sky is a basement ceiling. Cellar light. The wet snow is mounded over everything, censoring all garbage and details, the old tires and bottles around Kemp’s shack. It looks pretty and yet the clammy light saps any desire to venture out. We drink cocoa and eat little lemony cookies Kemp’s mama baked. I study for my finals as Kemp works on an old hunting rifle he has taken apart on the kitchen table. He picks up old guns and refurbishes them for fun and profit.
We hear the car drive up. With a leisurely shuddering yawn and stretch, Kemp goes to the window. I hope it isn’t Buddy. Kemp glides past me to his room and opens a drawer. I look out then, suspicious because of the tension of his stride, the silence. It’s a red T-bird I know I’ve seen parked downtown. It’s so red I always noticed it, well kept and polished except for one crumpled fender which I used to wonder why the owner didn’t fix. The man who gets out and squints carefully at the house is Black.
“Who’s that?” I ask with part-real and part-feigned innocence.
“Nobody.” Kemp sits at the table and works on his rifle as if he had heard nothing. “Take your book into my room. You can study in there.”
Slowly I walk to the bedroom doorway. I can see the Black man finish a careful survey of the locale and approach the door. “How come? Who is he?”
“Shut the door. It’s nothing I can’t handle, but I don’t want to be worrying about you.”
I shut the door and stand just inside. Another fence? Another little job? It’s none of my business, but as a writer, don’t I have to study everything? There is a loud insistent banging on the door.