That made me sit down.
I forced myself to recall our…whatever it was. How he’d gotten himself quite drunk the next night (as he had the night before); how he knew hardly anything about lovemaking except screwing, and was utterly oblivious to my gestures, my murmured suggestions. How he simply leaped on top of me when he adjudged me juicy enough, lunged and came and rolled off and fell asleep with his arm across my stomach.
I slid out from under his arm and went into the bathroom and drew a bath and masturbated. I let him sleep for an hour then roused him and made him leave. I didn’t want him coming from my room the next morning, and I didn’t want to sleep in the same bed with him, either. The sheet had dried by then, but I put a towel over it anyway.
Next day he acted sheepish, as if he didn’t remember exactly what had happened. He made a lot of jokes about getting soused. He wouldn’t meet my eyes and acted distracted all day. That night, as he brought me back from the site, he apologized: he was tired and hung over from the night before and was going to grab a sandwich and go to bed. And this infuriated me.
If he had wanted to sleep with me again, I fully intended to refuse. So why was I furious? I wanted him to feel so madly desirous that he would not want to give up a single moment with me—especially since Wednesday was my last night there. I wanted him to feel that way even though I didn’t. I didn’t know what to call my attitude, except bad. Still, I wanted to get even, so when some of the managers invited me to eat with them and sit around in the bar after dinner, I took them up on it. I flirted my tail off, and so did they. By midnight we were all buddies.
Next day I had to work intensely—it was my last chance. I had to make sure I hadn’t missed any opportunity for a terrific shot, and I wanted to retake certain shots in different lights. Mike was attentive and sweet, much as he had been before, but I had no time to worry about him. When he left me at the landing strip where I’d get the turboprop, he put his hands on my shoulders and looked deeply into my eyes, and murmured, lovingly, “Stacey, darling,” as if we’d been soul mates, deeply intimate. Then he kissed my forehead lightly and said he got to New York sometimes and would call me if he did and we’d find ourselves a fantastic steak.
This is what I’d used as the basis for a romantic dream.
How had I managed to convince myself, between Thursday and Sunday, that Mike Bostwick was the lover I’d been waiting for, the mate that fate had me created for? What’s more serious, what worries me, is the question of how I’ll ever be able to trust myself again if I imagine I’m in love with somebody. What would I have done if World hadn’t liked the pictures, if my “career” had ended yesterday morning? Would I have turned him into my meaning, my success? Would I have wept on the phone to him every night, having leaped every hurdle to find his telephone number, confessing passion and need? Humiliating myself, embarrassing him?
Just the same, the romantic dream helped. It got me through Sunday. It slid me gently back into the old round of marketing, dishes, laundry, and cooking, which now seem even more tedious and puny than they did before. After all, I am a person who flies to the Coast, who climbs up on huge cranes to photograph dams, who meets important people, who has glamorous love affairs! My mind is a mess. It is full of delusions and even though I know it, I can’t clear them away. I don’t know which to mistrust more: my heart or my mind.
3
JUNE 1948
Nothing left to hope for. It was in her, I knew it was in her, something special, something I wanted but didn’t have, what I would have given to have it! and yet she let it go, and so young. It isn’t as though I didn’t warn her, she knew what my life was like, I told her what would happen, having to get married, the shame and then nothing, the end of your life…. We never spoke of sex in this house, but she knew, she knew what happened to me. And even so, she did it.
Belle’s memory of desire was thin, like trying to remember what your mother meant to you before she grew old and senile. At least she had waited until she was mature, twenty-five, it was understandable that she would have…. But Anastasia was only eighteen, too young for a girl to feel desire. And the worst of it was it happened in the same month, February, the baby would be born the same month Anastasia had been born, it was as if her own fate had been imprinted on Anastasia, as if Anastasia herself could do nothing about it, it was destined.
Pregnant. Mom, I’m pregnant. What was there to say? Ed would have liked to scold, I wouldn’t let him. How could he? How could either of us, given what we…I’ll remember that priest in Washington forever, shrieking at him that he was depraved, filthy, a miserable sinner, a tool of the devil….The only time I saw Ed almost cry. Turned me against the church. So now she’s married too, married the same way, furtively, a quick trip to someplace, even the date of it lost, why bother to remember, you don’t remember the date your life ended. All that intelligence, so brilliant she was, talented too, she could have been anything, all her teachers said so—pianist, painter, teacher…. Not like me, no education, no culture, nearly deaf, blind in one eye, no chances…. I gave her everything, my whole life. Nothing, all for nothing.
Belle sits pleating hats. She is forty-four, but looks older. She is attractive with her fine pale hair, her delicate features, noble, even. Her face is the face of a lady, not a woman—important difference in 1948. But close up you can see how her face will age—how the ends of her eyes droop and fold into a pocket of puffy flesh, how the lines around her mouth are deepening and the hundreds of tiny lines slivering her fine pale skin. Her long fingernails are thick and yellow, ugly, she thinks. She keeps them coated with polish, a deep old rose. Pleating the hats wears off the polish from the tips of her nails. But her hands are still beautiful, the fingers long and slender and graceful. Her best feature.
She has no shame, Anastasia. You’d think she’d be miserable, humiliated that people were talking about her. You’d think she’d walk about with bowed head and cry, like her, like Belle. Jean had sighed in sympathy, “Oh, Belle,” as if Belle were the one in trouble. It was humiliating to have to tell them, their daughters would never get in trouble like that. Eric, of course, immediately reminded them that he had told them not to send Anastasia to college. Ed should have put his foot down and insisted she go to work, she was such a willful girl, it had been a waste to send her to college. Girls will get married, he said. It’s nature. She’d hated him at that moment, sitting there smug and self-satisfied, pronouncing about nature and girls as things that he would never have to worry about, safe and superior in his impregnable body. And what about his children? He gave them everything money could buy and she’d bet he’d send them to college too. Looks down on us, one law for him, another for us. Ed might not be as good a provider as Eric, but he’d never say a thing like that.
Girls! What about boys? Anastasia didn’t do this herself. But she did seem—how could she be?—happy with this Brad, unstable boy, funny eyes, pale, that don’t seem to see what they are looking at. No shame at all, you’d think she wanted to be pregnant, end her life so young. She even acts delighted with that stifling little one-room attic apartment, you have to walk through a stranger’s living room even to get to the stairs, horrible, she wouldn’t go there. No wedding, no wedding gifts, nothing to start life with. They didn’t even have a toaster, and when Belle lamented this, Anastasia laughed and said you could just as well make toast on the gas ring.
Horrible. Her life will be one long slavery. When she could have married a big doctor, a big lawyer, she’s attractive, she plays the piano well. If she had just…Well, at least they have their own place, that’s more than I had, but no money, Brad not even finished with school, the only decent maternity dress she has is the one I bought her.
Belle’s head ached. She set the hat down gently on the pile of finished work: ten, she thought, then counted them again. Yes, ten. She rose and went into the bathroom and swallowed two aspirin. She avoided her face in the mirror. She went back to the bedroom and lighted a cigarette. She sa
t down in the chair she worked in, but did not pick up another hat.
I’ll just have a cigarette. A little break.
Ten. And it was only eleven-twenty. She could finish forty hats today, although her fingers got sore from the pleating after a while, despite the calluses that protected the tips. Pleat ten more, then sew on ruching for an hour, prepare another twenty. Then cut out some fabric, size 6, to work on tomorrow. A decent day’s work. At this rate, 200 this week. Except she had a dentist appointment on Thursday, that would be time lost. Maybe 190. Not bad. Since her raise…what would that be? She couldn’t multiply 12 1/2 cents in her head. She set the cigarette in an ashtray and picked up the pencil that lay on her vanity. 190 x 12, she scrawled swiftly: $22.80. Then half a cent each on 190 caps, that would be 95 cents. $23.75.
What would that be by the hour? Minimum wage, they said on the radio yesterday; there was a minimum wage. How many hours do I work?
She laid the pencil down. She wasn’t going to keep track of her hours, she didn’t want to know.
Suppose it was terribly little, way below minimum wage? Better not to know.
So now there were just the bills, keeping things afloat until something happened. Save some money for Joy, if she wants to go to college. She probably won’t. Likes to have fun, be with her friends, throws up when she has examinations, not a student. Cute and funny though. But she doesn’t have what Anastasia had. Wasted. Three years yet before Joy would need it. Unless she too…
No. She tamped out her cigarette with grim mouth. No, it was Anastasia who was destined to repeat my fate, not Joy.
JUNE 1951
When they moved in Joy had loved the little wall fixtures in the bedrooms, two in hers and Anastasia’s, three in Mother and Daddy’s. They were made of porcelain Mother said and they had flowers painted on them and little etched glass chimneys enclosing the light bulb. But now she hates them because they cast so faint a light, they make shadows on her face when she looks at it in the mirror, like now, and they make her skin look yellow, but she isn’t really yellow, Kitty and Linda said she wasn’t, and she made them swear they were telling the truth, too. Anastasia had put all kinds of lamps in her room, four of them, it looked silly, six lights in one little room, of course they were all small, two on the bureau and two on the old green metal kitchen table Anastasia used for a desk, Anastasia hated darkness. But Anastasia had taken all her lamps with her.
Joy doesn’t have a desk, she does her homework at Linda’s every afternoon on the floor under a standing lamp with the radio playing. All the girls love the baritones, Dick Haymes and Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby and Joy especially loved Vaughn Monroe. The best singers were all men, it was funny. They said the best cooks were men too, but Joy had never seen a man cook. And all the best athletes were men. Even though Kitty and Linda and Joy played soccer and basketball pretty well, no one ever came to watch them. They didn’t really even have a team. But they loved to play it, running, your legs felt so great, then leaping up and tossing the ball, as if your body could fly, it was great….
She wonders if they will have sports at college. Real colleges have sports, but Joy is going to a junior college Hilton Academy in Virginia. Mother speaks of it condescendingly, she says it’s just a finishing school but Joy knows Mother is impressed just the same—impressed that she was accepted at all with her grades and because Alice Warren and Eleanor Staples two of the really rich girls in her class were going there too. But Joy feels that if it is really a finishing school, that is okay because she badly needs finishing. She is sure she went up in Mother’s estimation, now Mother has to picture her in a fancy school with those rich girls, the idea excites her it frightens her too she would have liked to do something like that when she was young but she probably would have been too scared. Not that Joy isn’t.
She tried to speak to Anastasia about it to see if she thought it was the right thing to do but Anastasia is strange these days all she cares about is photographing babies, not even her own babies, them she just drags along wherever she goes. Anastasia acts almost as if she thought that Joy is so stupid it doesn’t matter what she does. Maybe Anastasia isn’t the right person to talk to even though Joy has always looked up to her. Maybe Anastasia didn’t understand. She seems different or maybe she wasn’t different maybe Joy just never knew her. She always looks so shabby, her hair long and flying or done in a long braid down her back like a kid you wouldn’t think she was a married woman with two children of course she doesn’t have any money…but still…Anastasia doesn’t seem to care about how she looks or maybe she cares but she won’t admit it because she’s mad she can’t afford clothes and things. That’s what Joy thinks.
Joy thinks it is important how a person looks. She always tries to smile when she looks in the mirror. She is smiling now even though she doesn’t feel like smiling, not at all, she’d like to cry but she won’t. Sometimes—oh it was terrible—she would catch her face in the mirror when she wasn’t intending to look when she stood up straight and turned around after making her bed and then a terrible chill would come into her spine. So she’d smile to make it go away. But it would last a few seconds long enough that she was forced to register the new pimple on her chin or a right cheek aflame with them or even if there were no new pimples there were all the other things her yellow skin her full round face her slight sloping shoulders her long neck her broad hips. She hates her body, she hates her face! They all do Kitty and Linda too, she can’t understand it Kitty is so pretty and Linda has such a cute body.
But everybody has always said that Joy has a great smile, so she resorts to that, it is the only thing she knows to do. You can hate the way you look and you can try to change it with makeup and stuff but you can’t really change it. So you have to make people like you anyway. So you smile. Like now with no makeup on, in the red flannel Dr. Dentons she wears even in June because she is always cold, the smile works, it makes her feel better the brightness of her large blue eyes the broad delighted smile welcomes her in the mirror as if she were a stranger meeting her self….
Kitty is so pretty with her blond hair like a puff of gold around her face sweet delicate little face heart-shaped not big and round like Joy’s; and Linda has so much personality always full of energy and she is witty funny she cracks them all up all the time. And Penny is very smart Joy wants to introduce her to Anastasia Anastasia would enjoy Penny she’d see how smart she is even though she doesn’t do all that well at school but she doesn’t care she’s beyond that, school and all that because of her mother so sophisticated she’s taking Penny to Europe after graduation, three whole months traveling Paris Rome London all those places and Penny has her hair done by her mother’s hairdresser and had lessons in putting on makeup Penny’s really lovely although she’s putting on a bit too much weight that’s her mother letting Penny have cocktails with them every night Joy too when she eats there her throat so tense she can barely swallow sitting in the living room with music playing softly on the hi-fi. Penny’s mother always wears long gowns grey silk peach silk red brocade and her hair is as blond as Penny’s and swept up like a movie star’s and Penny’s stepfather pouring martinis from a tall glass pitcher so distinguished third husband Penny had seen a lot her father was an alcoholic and then the second husband too and he used to hit her mother too even though he was a big stockbroker.
All the other cheerleaders have something special Amy with her long straight red hair and Joanie with that creamy tan complexion that’s because she’s Italian and drinks olive oil and Kitty with her blond hair and Linda with her great smile they looked so great standing in front of the crowd yelling “Give me an S! Give me an O! Yay! Southside!” in their heavy white letter sweaters and short swingy skirts and saddle shoes and thick white socks folded over at the ankle. And Kitty and Linda always say she is the cutest of all of them. But they only say that because they are her friends and they love her. Joy loves them too and she will love them forever.
Joy switches off the wall lamp
near the mirror and turns toward the bed. The room is dark now except for the moonlight streaming through the back window the one facing the garden. Anastasia got the bedroom with the window seat but Joy likes hers better because it overlooks the garden. But right now she wishes she had a window seat and could sit by the window and look out at the dark shapes clustered on the pale lawn. Anastasia told her she used to sit on the window seat and smoke at night blowing the smoke out the window so it wouldn’t smell up the room and Mother would find out and she’d “moon” she said laughing “dramatizing body juices into the chemistry of tragedy.” Anastasia talked like that. Anastasia was smart.
She thinks she has a cigarette left in her purse. Maybe she will try it: the chemistry of tragedy. What would that be? Whatever it is, it sounds right for her now. She feels around on the chest of drawers for her purse, and riffles through it, finding a wrinkled pack of Luckies. She pulls over to the window the hassock that stands before her little vanity (which with the low wide chest and the bed are all the furniture that will fit in the room) and sits down on it. She doesn’t really mind that her room is so small, Linda’s room isn’t much bigger. But Kitty has a huge room, of course she has to share it with her sister, but it is a room and a half, it has like a little sitting room alcove and they have their own bathroom too. But her favorite is Betty Brower’s room her whole house is huge Joy would love to live up there in the expensive area the Canterbury section where the plots are all large and have huge old trees on them where Whit’s parents live they have two lots their property fronts on two streets. Betty has two beds in her room so she can have a friend sleep over and a big bureau and a vanity and a desk and a long chair she calls a shez. And in one corner there is a great heap of stuffed animals, some of them huge some little elephants and bears and horses and kitties and bunnies all piled on top of one another.
Joy pushes her face against the screen and breathes in deeply trying to sniff the sweetness of the June night. But all she can smell is the metallic odor of the screen. She lights the cigarette. She coughs lightly. She is not a smoker she only smokes to be like her friends. She realizes there is no ashtray in her room, and flicks the ashes in the palm of her hand the way the boys do. They say it doesn’t burn it doesn’t but it makes you feel dirty. She doesn’t want to be like the boys, she wants to be feminine. She gets up and tosses the ashes into the wastebasket, then wipes her palm along her pajama leg. That’s something a boy would do too but she is too lazy to go into the bathroom and wash it. She sits down again and gazes out. She breathes deeply. She waits to feel the chemistry of tragedy.