It occurred to me that I would have been Elizabeth's stepmother. I wanted to ask her about herself, what she did and where she lived, but I could see that Archie wanted to go. She could, too, and was taking her cues from him.
She must have felt me watching her walk away, though. At the corner, she turned around and flashed me a gloved peace sign.
I peaced her back. Then they were gone.
Y O U
C O U L D B E
A N Y O N E
A Girl Scout is clean in thought, word, and deed.
It's easy to be clean on the outside. All you need is soap and water and a scrubbing brush. It's harder to be clean on the inside.
—From Junior Girl Scout Handbook
He's broad and muscular from lifting weights and running every evening along the Hudson River. Blond and blue-eyed with a strong jaw and skin so pale it looks bleached. He is all handsome and no pretty, the kind that makes you think of the Navy and Florida and girls in tube tops calling him hunky. But he grew up in Manhattan, on Park Avenue: he will rise when you enter the room; he will notice that you're cold and drape his blue blazer around your shoulders; he will hail the taxi and open the door for you to get in.
On your first date, he will pick you up on his motorcycle, and bring a helmet for you. He nods his big helmet head when he's ready for you to get on. He fastens your hands around his waist like a seat belt.
You sense that he's dangerous but don't know why—and wonder if it's because he makes you feel safer than you've ever felt.
At the restaurant, low-lit and charming, he orders bourbon straight up with a beer chaser, and becomes low-lit and charming himself. When your dinner arrives, he takes vitamins out of his shirt pocket, and offers a twin supply for you.
You walk through the Village. It's spring. The air is cool and the sky is clear.
Back at your apartment, you pour him a glass of wine. On your sofa, he holds your hand in both of his, tickling and touching it, lingering at the crotches between your fingers.
You can feel that he wants to own you—not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having. He lets you know that you already own him.
—•—
He cannot see you often enough. He calls you every day at work, calls you every night at home. He says, "This is your boyfriend speaking."
He invites you to hear his moribund rock band, Pleather, at The Bitter End. The songs are harsh and vulgar, except "Will You Love Me Tomorrow."
He pushes his clothes aside to make space for yours in his closet.
He worries about your riding your bicycle in Manhattan. He buys you a flashing red light to put on your helmet, and when you ride away, he sings, "Staying alive, staying alive."
You love Airedales, and he writes away to make you a member of the Airedale Terrier Society of America. You get a membership card and their monthly newsletter, "The Black and Tan."
He remembers the names of everyone you mention—the people you work with, your friends, acquaintances, your entire extended family—and nicknames them: your complaining cousin Marjorie is "Martyrie"; your boss, Rachel, who has a thing for black guys, is "Racial."
You tell him your family history. He tells you his.
When he speaks of his mother, he uses the ironic intonation of quotation marks: "Mom" still lives in the apartment he grew up in, which he refers to not as home, but by its address. He passes 680 Park five times a week on his way to psychoanalysis.
—•—
You meet a few of his friends from Choate, which he calls "Choke." They banter instead of talk, and you play audience.
"They do shtick," he says afterward. "They're shtick-figures." You wonder at how easily he dismisses them; after all, they've been his friends for almost twenty years.
Then your brother meets him and says, "What's he so angry about?"
That's when you begin to notice. He argues with the drummer in the band. The waiter is rude, the cabdriver an asshole. The token seller gave him a dirty look, the dry cleaner lost his shirts on purpose. He hates our hateful senator, but with passion.
When you mention antidepressants, he looks at you as though suddenly discovering that you have the depth of a Doublemint twin.
He explains slowly: he wants to use his pain as the impetus and guide in his struggle to know himself; anesthesia is the opposite of what he needs.
You tell him you understand, but say, "Another bourbon and beer?"
—•—
He gets a Polaroid camera and is constantly snapping your picture. In his favorite, you're laughing hard, wearing a pair of his shorts on your head beret-style.
He says that you look like Patty Hearst during her Tanya phase, captured in a lighthearted moment with the Symbionese Liberation Army.
He says he loves the picture because he can see the silver in your fillings.
—•—
In a restaurant, he notices a gaggle of girl models. "It's like looking at art. The rest of us are just people," he says. "We know we're not beautiful the way they are."
—•—
He tells you that he doesn't want to hide anything from you. He wants to be closer to you than he's ever been to anyone.
In this spirit, he confesses the thoughts that shame him. You play the role of Red Cross volunteer, impervious and good-hearted, ladling out mush—until the night he tells you that he has been fantasizing about other women.
You know men do, you would assume that he does, but this truth said aloud, confession-style, becomes your own lurid infection.
He's oblivious. He says, "It's transference," putting himself on the couch: he's hating and loving you the way he did his mother. Fantasies are his way of escaping your power.
When he says that transference is a universal truth, you say, "For you, maybe."
You break up.
—•—
Everywhere you go, you see women more beautiful than yourself.
You imagine him being attracted to them.
You're drinking gasoline to stay warm.
—•—
When he calls and tells you he misses you, you invite him over. He spends the night.
In the morning, he asks where his razor is. You tell him that you threw it away when you broke up. He says, "I framed your deodorant."
—•—
He takes you to Paris for your birthday. Your friends say he's going to propose and you find yourself dressing for the event that you'll both reminisce about years later. You even put makeup on. After a few ringless dinners, though, you stop posing for the memory, and relax. You begin to enjoy the trip, just as he turns black and humorless.
He can't believe how expensive everything is; everyone is so arrogant; he's tired of walking in circles and wonders aloud if there's such a thing as delayed jet lag.
He says, "Are you wearing makeup?"
"You don't like it?"
He says, '"I think I like you better without."
In cafes, at museums, over dinner, he barely looks at you, and when he does, it's like he's trying to remember that he loves you.
"What?" you say, finally.
"It has nothing to do with you, honey," he says. "I'm doing the transference dance."
On your last night, after your birthday dinner, he's checking out. You go into his knapsack for a pen and find the engagement ring. You get chills. You lie down. When he comes back upstairs, you say that you're going out for a walk, alone.
"It's almost midnight," he says. "We have to get up early."
"I know," you say.
You walk down to St. Germain to the café where Simone de Beauvoir wrote her letters to Sartre—the café your boyfriend disdained, saying it was full of tourists.
You love it. You order wine. You smoke cigarettes. You play worthy Simone to his unworthy Jean-Paul.
On your second glass of wine, you notice a man staring at you. He's fleshy and balding and has long, straggly hair. You don't realize how short he is until he stands up, hardly rising a
t all, and comes over to your table.
"Hello," he says, and you see that he's missing one of his front teeth.
He stands before you, and begins to talk. His missing tooth gives him a slight lisp, and you enjoy listening to him. He speaks rapidly, mentioning famous Americans who regularly cross his path. He, himself, is an expatriate from New York; he tells you he's a lawyer, a screenwriter, an entrepreneur, very successful, very rich, and you think, Hey, why not devote an afternoon and a little cash to getting a new tooth? But you only smile. He smokes your cigarettes, and you smoke his.
He's entertaining you more than your boyfriend has all week and asking nothing of you, not even to sit down. For a long time, you don't even realize that he's standing, and when you do, you invite him to join you.
You make up a name for yourself, Deena. He is Wallace.
Once seated, he gets personal: "I see you're not wearing a ring, Tina—you've argued with your boyfriend, then?"
"Deena," you say. "I couldn't sleep." You wonder if this sounds credible.
"It's fine if you don't want to talk about it, Deena," he said. "That's fine."
You can tell he has met many women in circumstances like yours, because he speaks in generalities, about freedom and love, passion and fidelity; he's circling above, waiting for a sign from you—yes, that's it, that's my story—so he can land. You remain impassive, though, and finally, he says, "Listen, Tina, this guy has no idea what a remarkable woman you are."
"Deena," you say, adding that if he's going to give personal advice, he should at least get your name right.
"Deena, Tina, Nina," he said, "you know what I'm saying here."
"Yes," you say. "I know what you're saying."
You put some bills on the table for your wine and say you think you can sleep now, not caring if it sounds stagy.
"Listen, Deena . . ." he says, standing as you do.
You thank him for his advice, and before walking out, you bend down and kiss him on both cheeks.
You're a little drunk, but you feel fine. In Motown spirit, you say, "Girl, you can still bring a long-haired shortie with a missing tooth to his feet." You walk several blocks in the wrong direction.
As soon as you enter your hotel room, you're sober and sad again. You undress in the dark and brush your teeth and get into bed.
He says, "I went out looking for you."
You lie there, side by side, in the dark.
You need to tell him that you found the ring, but you hesitate. Telling all is his code. Not telling, however, complies with the code of the Wily Woman.
You say, "I found the ring."
"Fuck," he says.
You say, "You changed your mind about me."
"It isn't you," he says, as though you're to be comforted by the irrelevant role you play in your own life.
He says, "Please tell me how you feel."
You say, "I'm crestfallen," a word you have never used.
"I want to marry you," he says. "I know I do."
He turns on his side and moves closer, and tries to hold you. But you're conscious of his head and his chest and his arms just as hair and skin and bones.
—•—
The ring stays there, between you.
Sometimes you take it out of his sock drawer and look at it, and try it on. It makes you think of an ad on the back of your old Seventeen magazines—a couple in fisherman sweaters with the words, "A Diamond Is Forever."
Even so, you make love before anything else. The few nights you spend apart, he calls to say good night; the next morning he wakes you up by reading Langston Hughes poems on your answering machine.
At Christmas- and Hanukkah- and Kwanza-time, you're blue, because you don't belong to a religion, and his—psychoanalysis—doesn't have any holidays. He makes a candelabra out of wire hangers and duct tape. He lights sparklers and wings a prayer, listing what he believes in—"The Bill of Rights," which he recites from memory, natural-grass baseball diamonds, and your beautiful breasts.
—•—
You notice the swell of one of your breasts, and notice it again weeks later. When you direct his hand to it, his eyebrows slant into worry. He says, "You even swell swell," but he is the one who insists you call your gynecologist in the morning.
She sends you to a surgeon, who doesn't like what he feels. A few mornings later, the surgeon does the biopsy. The pathology lab will have your results in a week.
Meanwhile, your boyfriend reads Dr. Love's book and reports that the odds of getting cancer at your age are almost one in three thousand. He says, "You're not the one."
You keep telling yourself, "This is only a test," but that week of waiting for the results is an unrelieved high-pitched tone. Then you are told that it is a real emergency.
Too late, you realize that your body was perfect—every healthy body is.
After the initial devastation, you're calm. You watch his rage from the eye of your own storm. His "Why you?" seems beside the point, and you say so.
You say, "You're not helping me."
He will make calls, make dinner, make jokes; he will say that a modified radical sounds like a Black Panther who has moved to the suburbs and belongs to a food co-op.
When you decide on plastic surgery to reconstruct your breast, tunneling your latissimus muscle and fat and skin from back to front, he will call it the tunnel of love.
In post-op, he will tell you he is honored that you threw up on him. He will stay with you in the hospital all day, every day, and as late as he can at night. After visiting hours, when the night nurse says he has to leave, he will hide there with you, closing the curtain partition and keeping his feet up on your bed.
He will even get along with your brother. The two of them will take turns reading to you until you fall asleep or the night nurse brings a security guard.
You can feel how much he loves you. For a second, you think maybe if he can just hold on to you like this, he'll keep you from falling off the earth, out of this life.
—•—
After your first chemo treatment, before you lose your hair, he will take you wig shopping. He'll make it fun, and annoy the saleswoman by trying on wigs himself. You get one that looks like the hair you still have, and another like the hair you wished for as a teenager. Long and streaky blonde, it is a wig Tina Turner might have worn in the bad old days with Ike, and he makes you laugh by singing, "Left a good job in the city ..."
He will buy a satin pillow, which is supposed to slow the breakage and loss of your hair. Maybe it does, at first. Then there's a clump in the drain. A nest in your brush. You see more and more and more of your scalp. You wear a baseball cap all the time, even in front of him—especially in front of him.
When you can't stand it anymore, you ask him to shave your head, and he says he will be honored to be your hairundresser.
He will bring a shaver and temporary tattoos, for what he calls your new headstyle.
The moment before you take off your cap, you cry: "Don't ever remember what this looks like."
"Honey," he says, "I'm the man who loves you."
He sets up two bourbons and two beers, and goes to work. Every few minutes, he turns off the shaver to see if you are okay.
Afterward, the two of you look in the mirror. For less than a second, you see your hideous, hairless self—but right away your survival instinct kicks in and tells you the opposite: you are uniquely beautiful.
When you smile, so does he. "Very cool," he says.
He offers to shave his own head, in solidarity, but you say no. You don't want anyone mistaking you for latecomer disciples of Heaven's Gate; heaven is the last place you want to go, spaceship or no.
He clips pictures of dazzling black basketball players with shaved heads and tapes them to your refrigerator, proof that you belong to the bald beauty elite.
He writes his congressman and Runs for the Cure.
He goes with you to your doctors. He knows all the terminology. He reads all the research. He fi
lls your refrigerator with grapefruit and oranges, broccoli and carrots. He makes green tea for you. He reminds you to do your visualization exercises.
During chemo, you're more tired than you've ever been. It's like a cloud passing over the sun, and suddenly you're out. You don't know how you'll answer the door when your groceries are delivered.
But you also find that you're stronger than you've ever been. You're clear. Your mortality is at optimal distance, not up so close that it obscures everything else, but close enough to give you depth perception. Previously, it has taken you weeks, months, or years to discover the meaning of an experience. Now, it's instantaneous.
—•—
Two weeks after your last chemo treatment, one week before radiation, you're sitting around your apartment reading the paper, when he says that he feels ready to marry you. "I think I can do it now," he says, passing you the ring box as ceremoniously as if it's the phone, for you.
You don't take it. You say the truth as it occurs to you: "You're talking about you again."
Now he holds the box like it is what it is. "I'm doing the best I can," he says, and you know this is true.
Still, you say, "I'm not sure you even know who I am."
"I'm not sure I do either," he admits.
His words stop you. You realize that if he doesn't know who you are, he won't be able to remember who you were.
When you try to explain, he argues that you're not going anywhere. "Forget dying," you say. "Dying is beside the point anyway."
But then you hear that he can't hear you, you see that he can't see you. You are not here—and you haven't even died yet. You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol on the ladies' room door.
When he says, "I love you, honey," you realize that he never calls you by your name.
You will say good-bye for all the right reasons. You're tired of living in wait for his apocalypse. You have your own fight on your hands, and though it's no bigger or more noble than his, it will require all of your energy.
It's you who has to hold on to earth. You have to tighten your grip—which means letting go of him.
—•—