You’ve got to trust me on this; he made us laugh at the whole thing. The time to cry was long past, the time when we all found out that he tested positive for the AIDS antibody, the beginning of the time when he knew that to have a mole removed or a tooth out would be a major undertaking, fraught with feelings of fear and anger and shame.
And then it got less funny. I noticed a deep cut, and asked how he had gotten it. He had had an accident at home, but didn’t go for stitches. He couldn’t stand the idea of the fuss that would be made if he told them he was exposed. He couldn’t stand how he would feel about himself if he didn’t tell them.
And it stopped being funny at all when I came downstairs after he was gone and picked up my beer to finish it. And stared from the bottle in my hand to the bottle on the table and realized that I didn’t know which was mine and which was his. And, feeling horrible, hypocritical, paranoid, pitched them both in the trash.
Things are bad all over on the AIDS front, even in our house, where we have routinely done what some of the folks of Arcadia, Florida, and Kokomo, Indiana, and a host of other towns went to extraordinary lengths to avoid. Our friend plays with our children, eats at our table, is never permitted to leave without a hug and a kiss on the cheek. It would never occur to me to do otherwise. I know I will not be exposed through him.
I know.
I think.
I hope.
I wanted to jump right on the people who have been bigoted about this, the people in Arcadia who wanted to keep those three little boys out of school and who refer to gay people as “queers,” the ones in Kokomo who made Ryan White’s life so unbearable that his family left town, the parents in Texas whose pediatrician closed up shop last week because his little patients were taken home when it turned out he was antibody positive. The people who won’t eat at restaurants where gay waiters work or won’t give blood. Except there is a little bit of them in all but the very best of us. We call them ignorant, and they are. But I suspect we all feel at least a little ignorant where AIDS is concerned.
The problem is that we would love absolute certainty on all aspects of this issue. We are a nation raised on True or False tests. We want doctors to give us the answers, which shows how short our memories are. After all, it was the doctors who told us that smoking wouldn’t kill you and amphetamines during pregnancy didn’t do a bit of harm. We want to know precisely how this disease spreads and why some people who are exposed get it and some don’t and whether being exposed means inevitably getting sick. First we hear that the biggest argument against transmission through casual contact is that health-care workers don’t get it. Then we hear that health-care workers have gotten it. And we don’t know what to believe. All we know for sure is that getting sick means dying, at least so far. And that you can’t get it from a beer bottle that’s been sitting around for an hour. I know that.
I think.
I hope.
There is a very small cadre of smart and deeply committed people who have an unwavering commitment to never letting one small bit of the misinformation about this filter into their psyche. And there is a larger cadre of those who are using their poor children as an excuse to spout venom and lies about groups of people they despise and feel threatened by. And then there are a lot of people in the middle, people trying to be smart and rational about this, people who read the latest stories and statistics and try to be sensible and yet who watch a mosquito coming toward them and wonder where it’s been and whose blood is inside it. When our friend first found out he had been exposed, he offered to stop visiting our house. I was indignant. What did he take me for? In medical parlance, it would be necessary for there to be “an exchange of bodily fluids” for him to infect my children. There was no risk to having him to dinner, more of a risk to cutting him out of our lives and depriving ourselves of his friendship and of our own self-esteem. So I smiled as he roughhoused with the older boy, and all the time somewhere in my mind I was thinking, “Please, God, don’t let the kid accidentally bite him.”
Columnists are usually in the business of opposites, of us and them. And that’s what this started out being, a column about us and them. I continue to think about myself as different from people who torment first graders whose only crime was a bad blood transfusion, who are probably more likely to become mortally ill from well kids than the other way around. I continue to think of myself as different from those people who would leave a dying man on the sidewalk if he were bleeding in certain areas of New York and San Francisco. But I’ve watched the mosquitos on occasion, I must admit. And one night not too long ago I threw away the butt end of two perfectly good beers because one was mine and the other wasn’t. Sometimes, when I’m feeling self-congratulatory, I think about that and I am ashamed, and I realize that maybe there is someplace between us and them, and that this is it.
GROWING
UP
GOOD GIRL, BAD GIRL
We met when we were both fifteen. She went to the beach with my family that summer, and when she stepped out of the bedroom we shared, wearing a two-piece bathing suit, I watched my father and one of his friends turn pale beneath their ruddy tans. As I lay on the beach in my own suit, its top boned into the facsimile of a bust, I could lift my head and through the gap between my sternum and the fabric see a sliver of gray-green water. For the first time in my life I was aware of sex, not the act, nor the mechanics, but the essence of it. And a gulf began to open between my friend and me.
But she was my best friend, and hard as it may have been to figure by the looks of us, she was the good girl, I the bad. I suppose everyone has at least one friendship like this in their lives. We were dialectical, she the thesis, I the antithesis. She was direct, trustworthy, kind, and naïve; I was manipulative, selfish, and clever. She laughed at all my jokes, took part in all my schemes, told everyone that I was the smartest and the funniest and the best. Like a B movie of boarding school life, we stole peanut butter from the refectory, short-sheeted beds, called drugstores and asked them if they had Prince Albert in a can. Whenever I hear a mother say, “If so-and-so told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it?” I think of her. On my order, she would have jumped.
She hatched only one plot in all our time together, and it had such staggering simplicity that I leapt at it, sneaking down the fire escape in the middle of the night to meet our boyfriends at an all-night diner. It wasn’t her fault that we got caught, that I got expelled, that she stayed on to become May Queen. It was the mid-sixties, so all we had done was to eat cheeseburgers and feel naughty. But as the bad girl I got the blame, and as the good girl she was assumed to have followed my lead. It was a time when good girls still got the breaks. It seemed terribly unfair then but seems exactly right now. And the gulf widened.
I went to a college that had a reputation, and she went to one with a football team. She was in the Midwest and I was in the Northeast. She cried when I told her I was on the pill, and she goggled at the suggestion that I was opposed to the war in Vietnam and wore overalls to class. I was a middle-of-the-road milquetoast at a school with its fair share of campus radicals, but she made me feel like Jane Fonda. I drove eight hours to her parents’ home the summer after our freshman year to be the maid of honor at her wedding. Where she came from, a girl didn’t wait for her B.A. to get her Mrs., particularly if the person who proposed was eager, older, and very rich. I wore purple organza and looked like an eggplant. There was a fountain full of whiskey sours. Within a year she had her first baby.
The seventies turned out to be a good time for bad girls, for the kind of girls who got A’s in algebra and F’s in conduct. I graduated from college and became a writer. I could always tell when she’d just had a haircut, because she’d call to say she’d seen one of my stories in a magazine in the beauty parlor. Right after one baby she had had another: son, daughter, daughter, son. Four children in seven years.
One night she called and asked me the kind of questions about life and love that you expect from yo
ur teenage sister, and I cried after we hung up. She was stunned when I got married, incredulous that a man with whom I had been living for years would buy the cow when he could get the milk for free. She sent me stationery with my new initials, not knowing I would not change my name. She and her husband flew in for the wedding in their private plane. The chasm was complete. A year went by before we spoke again.
Along came the eighties—a time of synthesis, thank God. No bad girls, no good girls, just women trying to get by as best they could. My friend finally stopped living in the past and I finally started paying attention to the present. She realized that she deserved more than the man to whom she was unhappily married, and I realized that I needed more than the work that I adored. She got divorced. I had a baby. She went back to college. I had another baby and quit my job. She got her bachelor’s degree with honors, started the first real job she ever had, and moved away from the town where she was born. I worked hard to sink roots in the city I’d adopted, and went back to work part time. Last month we talked on the telephone for an hour about real estate, business clothes, family size, private schools, salary levels, divorce settlements, marriage, money, and men.
It’s been almost twenty years now. Everything has changed. And yet some things never do. She never lost her figure. I never lost my edge. We’ve never been closer. In the last analysis, even at the best of times, there was never much more between us than love. But as the Beatles once said, it’s all you need.
CITY KID
In the city neighborhood in which I live, stoop sitting is the primary summer spectator sport. One night, I found myself doing it with my father. Together we looked out on the vista of brick row houses, ten-family tenement buildings, and dozens of other stoops filled with other families. Across the street three elderly women were watching from their windows, pillows cushioning the sills; a group of men were fixing the transmission of a beaten-up Plymouth, and a wiffle-ball game was under way with pieces of corrugated cardboard box serving as bases.
My father leaned back and said philosophically, “Your grandfather worked hard all his life so that none of his grandchildren would ever have to live like this.” I knew he was right. America is a country that loves lawns, and I have become a city kid. When my parents were growing up, success could be measured by how far you managed to travel from the tenements and the cement stoops. Lots of my friends have measured their success by whether they have managed to stay.
For many of us, these are the crunch years for setting up homes and setting down roots, when people dig in their heels or get out. In my neighborhood, the moving vans have been lumbering by like prehistoric beasts, dragging out antique bureaus and brass beds, taking them to places of grass and trees and lawn furniture.
These are places where the schools are good. The schools here aren’t. Much of the green on our streets comes from glittery pieces of broken beer bottle. At 2:00 A.M. you can wake bolt upright to the sound of rap music coming from big shiny boxes with detachable speakers, music so loud it sounds as if it’s coming from the clock radio next to the bed.
So people leave—usually for the sake of the children. You can open the door and let them outside and not worry that they’ll be run over by beer trucks, these people say. You can let them go sledding in winter and swimming in summer and in between they can burn leaves at the curb and catch whirligigs that spin down from the maple trees and split them and stick them to the bridges of their noses. They can trick-or-treat and go caroling. There will be a basketball hoop at the end of every driveway.
It sounds wonderful. Perhaps my kids would love it. Certainly their father thinks they would. It’s just not for me. I grew up in the suburbs; I know about catching lightning bugs and putting them in an empty peanut butter jar with holes punched in the top, and having a permanently scuffed place in your backyard where home plate always is. I’m not going to say it’s sterile and awful, and dull people live there. That’s not true. It’s just that, like the perfectly nice guy you meet on a blind date who would be great for your friend Carol but could move to Indianapolis for all you care, the suburbs and I have no chemistry. The first time I walked down Broadway, something deep inside me just said “Yes.”
My “Yes” should be subordinated to what is best for my children, according to one school of thought. I may actually spend a few grades in that school—if I decide that its opinion does not reflect a Tom Sawyer fantasy about children that is way off base. My children seem to like some of the same things about the city streets that I do: the people constantly eddying around them, the shifting play of color and movement, the 78-rpm metabolism in a 33⅓ world. Maybe they would prefer a yard, and the smell of the grass when it’s just been mowed. There is a certain pathos to the fact that it is a big deal excursion for them to visit the lawn at the local college on the hill.
Those are the philosophical considerations. For lots of people we know, the decision to move has been financial. It’s pretty chilling to discover that real estate is a primary determinant of family size in New York, and that the only-child phenomenon is to some extent a byproduct of the one-bedroom apartment. Some people have told me the only way they would have room for two is to move to the suburbs. Some simply said that they did not want to answer any more questions from their three-year-olds about why disheveled strangers were calling them Satan the Devil Incarnate the Son of Richard Nixon.
So someday the van may come to our house for what I can’t help thinking of as the longest trip of our lives. My kids will play with other kids who are just like them, on streets that are just like ours and just like the one where I played with kids just like me. Perhaps my chemistry, my metabolism, will change. Not long ago my closest friend, who was a city person as sure as I was, moved to a place out in the suburbs for business reasons. We agreed that she’d have to tolerate it. Instead she bloomed. “It’s so quiet and peaceful,” she said happily over the phone. Exactly. That’s my problem, right there.
MELTING POT
My children are upstairs in the house next door, having dinner with the Ecuadorian family that lives on the top floor. The father speaks some English, the mother less than that. The two daughters are fluent in both their native and their adopted languages, but the youngest child, a son, a close friend of my two boys, speaks almost no Spanish. His parents thought it would be better that way. This doesn’t surprise me; it was the way my mother was raised, American among Italians. I always suspected, hearing my grandfather talk about the “No Irish Need Apply” signs outside factories, hearing my mother talk about the neighborhood kids, who called her greaseball, that the American fable of the melting pot was a myth. Here in our neighborhood it exists, but like so many other things, it exists only person-to-person.
The letters in the local weekly tabloid suggest that everybody hates everybody else here, and on a macro level they do. The old-timers are angry because they think the new moneyed professionals are taking over their town. The professionals are tired of being blamed for the neighborhood’s rising rents, particularly since they are the ones paying them. The old immigrants are suspicious of the new ones. The new ones think the old ones are bigots. Nevertheless, on a micro level most of us get along. We are friendly with the Ecuadorian family, with the Yugoslavs across the street, and with the Italians next door, mainly by virtue of our children’s sidewalk friendships. It took awhile. Eight years ago we were the new people on the block, filling dumpsters with old plaster and lath, drinking beer on the stoop with our demolition masks hanging around our necks like goiters. We thought we could feel people staring at us from behind the sheer curtains on their windows. We were right.
My first apartment in New York was in a gritty warehouse district, the kind of place that makes your parents wince. A lot of old Italians lived around me, which suited me just fine because I was the granddaughter of old Italians. Their own children and grandchildren had moved to Long Island and New Jersey. All they had was me. All I had was them.
I remember sitting on a corner wi
th a group of half a dozen elderly men, men who had known one another since they were boys sitting together on this same corner, watching a glazier install a great spread of tiny glass panes to make one wall of a restaurant in the ground floor of an old building across the street. The men laid bets on how long the panes, and the restaurant, would last. Two years later two of the men were dead, one had moved in with his married daughter in the suburbs, and the three remaining sat and watched dolefully as people waited each night for a table in the restaurant. “Twenty-two dollars for a piece of veal!” one of them would say, apropos of nothing. But when I ate in the restaurant they never blamed me. “You’re not one of them,” one of the men explained. “You’re one of me.” It’s an argument familiar to members of almost any embattled race or class: I like you, therefore you aren’t like the rest of your kind, whom I hate.
Change comes hard in America, but it comes constantly. The butcher whose old shop is now an antiques store sits day after day outside the pizzeria here like a lost child. The old people across the street cluster together and discuss what kind of money they might be offered if the person who bought their building wants to turn it into condominiums. The greengrocer stocks yellow peppers and fresh rosemary for the gourmands, plum tomatoes and broad-leaf parsley for the older Italians, mangoes for the Indians. He doesn’t carry plantains, he says, because you can buy them in the bodega.