Braided Lives (48 page)

“I won’t do it again. I won’t! You’ll see. I have to prove that. I have to prove it to myself.”

“You can’t unfuck him, Donna.”

“Yes, I can. I can get myself back from him. This time I’ll face the ugly thing I’ve done and take control. Then I’ll be safe. I’ll know I can control myself and it won’t ever happen again.”

“Donna, you can’t make this guy act out a little magic play with you.”

“I’ll act cold and say I’m miserable and shocked. I’ll make a big fuss about how awful I feel. I’ll tell him I can’t go to Mass tomorrow because of what we did—he’s brought up Catholic too. I know how to get at him.”

“I don’t want you to go! It’s crazy.”

“It’s not crazy. And I’m not. I won’t be crazy and sick. I don’t want to be out of control. I have a chance to fix my life now, to prove I’m not a rotten nymphomaniac, and to get what I want. Come with me, Stu! Please.”

“No! It’s stupid. I promised Howie I’d go to the funeral. I’ll get a ride back in with him and be here by eight or so.”

She lies in her bed, turned to the wall. Minouska springs up and climbs over her. She cradles her cheek in the cat’s black flank. I would like to shake Donna from her rigidity. “Donna, listen,” I begin. She does not open her eyes or acknowledge me. Her breathing is deep and regular but as I bend over her, her lids quiver. I decide I will go sit in a hot bath for my ass in spite of the warmth of the night. I turn away and take Joyce’s
Ulysses
off to the tub to read. When I finally go to bed, she really is asleep, snoring softly, a placid, secure sound.

Some people look smaller in grief: Howie’s grandmother. She seems to weigh sixty pounds and have as much substance at the grave as a furled black umbrella. Some people come loose from their center and spread out: Howie’s mother looks as if she had gained thirty pounds and as if her arms had grown long and gangly, pulling partly out of their sockets. Her dress hangs in back. She leans on Milton, Howie’s older brother who fought in Korea and didn’t want to be a doctor and works for a plumbing and heating firm. Milt looks vague in the cemetery, as if worrying about something distant, his bills, his children, his wife. He holds Mrs. Dahlberg with an arm around her shoulder and by rote he gives comfort, but his eyes are distracted.

Standing beside me, Howie has hardly spoken. I greeted him when I arrived at the synagogue, just in time for the service. I sat toward the rear. The room was only a third full. From the conversations I overheard afterward, I realized many of the mourners were in the funeral business and couldn’t help judging the job critically.

This familiar cemetery is now a graveyard where the dead are put away rather than a promenade where I go to argue and debate with Howie, to confess and to question. The sky flattens us like a steam iron. I sweat in my black shirtdress. When I touch my scalp, I burn my hand. About thirty of us are gathered at the grave.

I take Howie’s hand, like grasping a piece of stone in the shade. He lets me keep his hand, but he is so rigid I think if he bent over, he would be permanently creased into that new shape like a cardboard cutout. Sweat stands out on his broad forehead but his hand is cold marble. A monarch butterfly zigzags across an avenue among the mausoleums toward us where we stand on the plain of small crowded graves. Right across from me I read:

REBECCA MOSHER BELOVED WIFE OF AARON MOSHER LOVING MOTHER OF SANFORD, SHEILA AND ROBERT

1898-1942

A Hebrew inscription underneath I cannot read. A short life.

It is Howie’s turn to step forward and toss in a handful of dirt. I like the literalness of the gesture. Several wreaths, rather fancy, friends in the business. Howie looms beside me again. People are saying goodbye. We walk among the Mogen Davids and the stone flowers in stone urns and the modern high-gloss slabs of dark granite streamlined as if to rush off somewhere in eternity. He says, “We’ll have to get out of the house now. I’ll have to help her look. Milt doesn’t have room for both her and Grandma.”

“Why move so fast?”

“Because the house comes with the custodial job. The new guy’s been good about not moving in while Papa was in the hospital…. Now finally my family won’t live in a cemetery.” He smiles wryly. “A bit late to improve my social life in high school.”

He wants me to drive back and is astonished that I don’t know how. “I’ll teach you,” he promises. “I wish I had already.”

We are close and yet silent. He has the radio tuned to a Black station and the R & B thrums my body. For long moments I forget to be serious and loll there in the hot car, enjoying the music, enjoying being driven through the flat summer with the windows open and my hair blowing. We stop to eat at a Greek place in Ypsilanti, the industrial town next to Ann Arbor where Kaiser-Frazer just shut down. Neither of us can slip back into a collegiate setting yet. At five forty-five the restaurant is half empty. We both want wine badly but Howie does not succeed in ordering it. He will not be twenty-one until he finishes the university.

“Come on,” I say in exasperation to the old waiter. “We just buried his father. We just came from the funeral.”

“The law’s the law,” the old waiter tells us mournfully, but he lets me order retsina on my fake ID. We sit in a booth and drink wine from the same squat glass.

“Where’d you get that?” He picks up the ID. “Doesn’t look like you.”

“Peter gave it to me. As I broke up with him yesterday, you can skip the obligatory vomiting and stomping…. You’re still numb, aren’t you?”

He nods. “I’ve walked through it all. I can’t let myself feel yet. I’d fall apart—like Mother. You can’t have everybody fall apart. I took the best role, being practical, making arrangements.” He finishes a glass by himself. “Why does this taste like something you should use to take paint off a door?”

“Will you ever let yourself feel it?”

“Of course. Just not right now.”

I don’t understand where emotions go if you deny them. Do they wither or molder or gather strength underground? Being nervous this evening makes me less warm and comforting than I want to be. I want to be graciously distracting, but all the time I am worrying about Donna and resenting worrying about her.

Probably she didn’t go out with the towny. Probably Peter called and she’s seeing him. Right now they are in bed together celebrating my removal from that charged space between them. I can’t say that my presence did Howie any good today, but his mother appreciated it and I owe him many good turns. It was me he asked to keep him company through the funeral and the burial, not Dick, not Bolognese. I am a little proud.

Maybe he would rather have asked Alberta on whom he has a crush worthy if totally futile. Alberta is as conventional in her ideas about love and marriage as she is radical in her economic politics, and would never consider a man seven years her junior. A sect is a religion that only a few people belong to and a crush is a love that is felt only by one, I think, minimizing labels for what we don’t happen to share. My eyes keep straying to the big Pepsi-Cola clock over the door to the kitchen. I do wonder where Donna is. With Peter, of course. He’d want to see her today. Off with the old and on with the new. It’s just all going to be awkward as a full chamber pot in the middle of our bedroom floor.

I suddenly realize Julie got married that summer to Carl. But when? I can’t remember that. It was hot and Julie kept worrying that it would rain. All I have is a snapshot of the three of us. Julie is grinning and has her arms around both of us. Her dress is white tulle and sticks out alarmingly. I remember she wore three or four crinolines under it, the stiff petticoats that were fashionable then and stiffened by allowing sugar water to dry on them. There am I on her left in the notorious dress. Looking at it now I still don’t understand what Peter was objecting to, but many years and a couple of husbands have taught me that when somebody wants out, even the caviar is too salty. On the right, Donna stands shielding her eyes from the sun. Something strange is happening to the old snapshots and Donna is fading. You cannot read her features at all because she and the landscape behind her are escaping from the paper into a featureless glare. In the next photo beside it, Julie awkwardly holds Carl, Jr., wrapped in a blanket, as she stands in front of a brand-new tract house.

I am sure Donna will be in our room. Across the hall someone is taking a bath. Wanda is chatting on the phone. Upstairs on the third floor Ravel’s
Bolero
plays loud. She is not in our room.

When Wanda hangs up, I grab her. “Do me a favor. I beg you.”

“Absolutely, kid.” She grins, sitting spread-legged in paint-stained jeans on the stairs. “Name your poison. Who do you want bumped off?”

“Quite a few people, actually, but I’ll settle for one phone call. If you call the number I give you in Detroit, just ask if Donna’s there. If he asks who you are, just say you’re a friend from her house. If you get her on the phone, just ask where I am, you’re trying to find me. I’m just trying to locate her.”

“So why can’t you call her yourself?”

“Because of the male person who may answer the phone. Do it for me, Wanda.”

“Okay, toots. But remember, the celibate life is the simple life.” She dials Peter’s number. Donna is not there but Peter is. So much for that gambit.

I go back to our room. My scalp is lead. The backs of my hands itch. Every time I look at the clock it is ten after nine. I have to fight the desire to call Howie and urge him to come back to keep me company. I have made Minouska nervous till she prowls the room like my black anxiety embodied. I cluck and call but she will not come. Only flattens her ears and stares, flicking her skinny tail. She keeps counting her two kittens. I no longer even wish Donna back, but only that I did not suspect where she is.

I am scared to the bone now. What is she doing to herself, and do I have to watch, to participate? Tendrils creep in my neck, tightening around my eyes. Glass ashtray heaped with butts. The one I stole from the sweetshop long ago to match her boosted teapot. Spiral that has not come to rest. I chain-smoke till my mouth stinks.

The door opens slowly. Stiffly, fists clenched, Donna stands with her head hanging forward as if it were loose. The pen falls from my hand. She steps into the room and then gripping my desk chair, vomits. She turns, shaking her head, to walk a few steps and sit on the edge of her twin bed. Her chin is stained with something dark and caked. Blood? As she writhes sideways and begins vomiting again, I shove the wastebasket before her. Long after her stomach is empty she gags, her muscles jerking.

I sponge her face, take off the crumpled dress, torn in the hem, bodice smeared with dust and grease. Then I clean the floor, the chair, the basket. Smell of vomit thick in the room. I open the windows high. “What happened?” Ritualistic phrase. I ask it in dreams. Her teeth are chattering. Swollen spots that will be bruises mark her arm that lies limp on the sheet. Her panties are missing and on her brassiere are spots of what has to be blood, although it does not seem to be from her breasts. I reject this nightmare in which I lay out her body, smoothing the sheet. I am exhausted. Her face is badly swollen.

“What happened?” I repeat. “Are you hurt?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“Are you bleeding anywhere?”

“I don’t know.” She writhes in the bed. “My back hurts bad.”

Gently I turn her over. More bruises. A cut on her right buttock. I get antiseptic and sponge it.

When I turn her back to face me, her eyes focus for the first time. “He had a car tonight.” Voice small and pallid, wondering. “I said I had to talk to him.”

“I thought you’d see Peter tonight.”

“He didn’t call. I couldn’t see him, being guilty…. I went through the whole routine how I was ashamed and I’d never done anything like it. I tried to flatter him, saying I got carried away.” She pauses. “My mouth tastes awful.”

“Want a glass of water? Tea? I could make you tea?”

“I couldn’t keep it down…. He said we’d go eat a pizza and talk. Then he parked by the river. I got scared. I left his car. He came after. He wanted to and I wouldn’t.”

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“We were out of town by the river. He caught me by the arm and he wouldn’t let go of me. I kept telling him to take me home. He kept saying I did it with him once already so what difference did it make?” She stops, leaning to spit blood into the basket. “He kept on.”

“Did he break a tooth?”

“I can’t tell yet. I fought so hard, Stu! I never thought men could really rape you, if you fought.” She twists under the sheet. “He wouldn’t stop. I held him off till my arms were so sore I couldn’t raise them. God, my back hurts. I think I pulled something.”

“Let me call a doctor. Or take you to health service.”

“No! I’m too ashamed. I don’t want this on a record.”

“Why should you be ashamed? You didn’t rape him.”

“I couldn’t scream. I can’t explain. I was afraid to. I was afraid he’d kill me if I screamed. He kept slapping my face when I tried to bite him. I had a nosebleed.”

The blood on her brassiere. “Donna, Donna …” I take her head in my lap. As if the touch released her, she begins to cry. Tears soak through my skirt, fitting it to my thigh like a warm poultice. I hug her frail head. “Donna, it’s all right now. You’re safe. And you didn’t give in.” I hardly listen to what I mumble. Tears flow across my thigh like blood from a female wound. At last she is inert and her breathing eases. Thinking she is asleep, I pick up her clothing to deal with it, but she stirs again.