Braided Lives (54 page)

“Actually he’s younger than you are,” I say with weak malice.

“But he’s strong, even if he hasn’t that commanding manner.” She cocks her head waiting for me to agree. “Stu, don’t tell him about Roger. I said I never really slept with him.”

After what he heard? “But why?”

She plays with the shawl’s fringe. “That’s too recent. I’m sure he liked it better this way.” She sighs, rubbing the shawl against her cheek. “I hope you won’t think I’m … callow. But I was exaggerating about sleeping with Rob. I didn’t want you to know how inexperienced I was….”

My head flips like a coin. Rob but not Roger for Howie; Roger but not Rob for me; and for her? I don’t know that I buy it at all. Rob has certainly been to bed with Lynn and several other women I know, and Stephanie went out with him for over a year.

“I was a virgin with Roger. Wasn’t that a stupid beginning?” She pulls the shawl up to cover her face. “My father, do you know I’m afraid of him? He’d kill me if he knew. What a botch he’s made of me. Praising me, oh Papa’s little darling, the prettiest one, who’d better mind Papa or she’ll get her arm broken.”

Her voice urgent, sibilant. Casting a spell. “Stephanie, you have left home, after all….”

“Nonsense. You don’t leave that easy where I come from. Don’t interrupt! And don’t tell anyone, ever. Ever since I was a child I’ve wakened at night and seen him standing by the foot of my bed staring at me. He still makes me sit in his lap when he gives me my allowance. In high school he kept telling me how dirty boys were. They’ll want to get under your dress. He’s out of his mind. I wonder I’m not.” She lowers the shawl, twisting it. “To get free of him! I’ve never told this to anyone, I won’t again. At Roger’s, whenever there was a step in the hall, I used to sit up in bed terrified it was him. A man for me has to be strong. Strong enough to throw Papa downstairs the way he threw me down when I was foolish enough to accept a date in high school.” She stops short, taking a breath that escapes in that bubbling laugh, and I breathe again. Her story has beaten me into a submission of the imagination. She lets the shawl drop, sitting up. “Yes, look at me. You see how much I need Howie!”

I sit dazzled. Then I remember a fact nibbling my mind: she has two sisters. Stephanie, I’m sure it’s all true but also exaggerated for effect. “Have you told him this?”

“No, and I never will. You think I want to scare him off? He’ll save me, without knowing he has. I mean to do this one right.”

Poor Howie or not? “Right, how?”

“Because it’s going to be a long haul. He’s bound for medical school. I won’t be a drag on him—I hate women who cling and strangle men. My mother’s like that. I mean to be civilized.”

“It only just happened. You may want a man, but is it Howie?”
Me,
he came to see tonight,
me,
I want to shout, but it is too late to complain. I have only my own procrastination and quibbling to blame. The next man I’m interested in I’ll jump first and think about it afterward.

Kicking off her boots, she tucks her feet under her. The flush that marked her face in his room warms it again. “He’ll be a handful. He’s stubborn and not at all broken in. No woman has rubbed down his sharp corners yet. Demanding and independent as a porcupine. I’ll hold him on a very loose rein.” She hugs her knees. Her restlessness tortures me, all this energy struck into heat by him. “You must tell me everything you know about him—everything!”

“Nobody’s the same with two people. We’ve been friends, and that’s a different matter.”

“And you’ll go on being friends. You’ll see—I won’t interfere with you in the least. If you hadn’t been friends, how would I have met him? Even if the two of you were together one time and got drunk or something and ended up in bed, I’d understand. I don’t expect him to be faithful to me one hundred percent.”

“Don’t be absurd.” I stand up and begin unpacking. “It isn’t that kind of relationship.”

“I know,” she says soothingly. “I’m just trying to explain how I feel. I mean, two people can’t pledge to be absolutely everything to each other forever. I don’t want him to feel I kept him from anything he wanted or thought for a while he wanted.”

“Agreed. But you might be more jealous than you imagine. One can rationalize and reason till the sky falls in and mean it, and still be blind jealous,” I say with real feeling.

“I’m sure you’re right…. He fascinates me. I knew something good was going to happen. It was time, it had to. I want so much to break out! I hope I’m wise enough to hold on to him.”

Against my will and my desire, I almost hope so too.

I know that one of these damned days I am going to be forced to have my phone unlisted, but I put it off because it seems like giving up on being a real person. Besides, I want sponsors to find me for readings because that’s a lot of my income. Unfortunately strangers call up all times of the day and night, surprised that when they want to tell me their feelings or ask personal questions because they imagine they know me as I do not imagine I know them, I turn out to be in the bathtub or asleep and cranky or eating supper with my mouth full of potatoes.

The worst is when somebody arrives on the doorstep. That morning, eleven thirty actually, when I’ve usually been at my typewriter for a couple of hours already, Josh and I were both naked and screaming at each other about who said who ought to go on a diet. If I’m interrupted in midfight, I would prefer to be overheard arguing politics or philosophy and not whether Josh or I first implied the other was carrying five or six pounds extra around the belly.

We have tempers and we screech a lot, unlike my last husband who thought if you expressed hostility aloud (instead of quietly acting it out for the next decade), the trees would wither in a quarter of a mile radius and the songbirds drop dead feet up. Josh and I have fights where we both swear we are about to drive off in the night or kill ourselves; we have silly fights like this one made up at once in bed, where we belonged right then.

“I’m never going to eat anything,” my Roaring Boy was bellowing. “I’m going to starve myself to death!”

“Hello? Hi?” The voice came through the screen door.

We looked. Josh said with slightly crushed urbanity—both of us being more modest of our privacy than of our privates—“Hi there. Er, who are you looking for?” Hoping it was our summer neighbors.

“Jill, of course.”

That didn’t mean anything. They all call me Jill.

“Yes,” I said. “Look, I like people to call before they appear.” I did let her in, naked as I was, because I never know if they’re in real trouble. Sometimes women who call really need something I can give or pass along or provide, like concrete help. I have the normal capacity to feel smug after being of assistance. But most times it’s ego knocking.

“I hitchhiked from New York today. I thought Mother would find the note and call you by now….” She was following me into my bedroom, when I turned to snarl, “Sit in the living room, please. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Josh slumped on the bed, having carefully shut the door. “Oh, here I am your groupie from Indianapolis who just happened to be on vacation nearby and I’ve brought a four-thousand-page manuscript I plan to read aloud. Here we are a whole coven of us and we’re about to make a druidical sacrifice of a blue goat on your front lawn. Here I am, an all-A student, writing a term paper on you, and I’ve come to ask you to fill out a forty-six-page questionnaire on your religious and philosophical beliefs for my research.”

“Shhhh. Since I’m not offering you around for lunch, why don’t you put your pants back on?”

The bastard excused himself, offering to go to town for the mail. I strode out but our visitor had disappeared into the kitchen. She sat on the table swinging her foot, absently picking up breakfast crumbs with her forefinger. “Don’t you know me, Aunt Jill?”

I looked carefully. Frankie died unfathering so far as I know, but Leo had six kids by various marriages. She didn’t resemble my nieces by Leo, all black-haired with the family eyes and handsome. Her hair was sandy and kinky, close to her head. She was big-boned, a little awkward, her face not formed yet. She wore cutoffs and a shirt tied under the breasts to leave her waist bare. I shuddered to think she had hitchhiked from New York dressed that way. “Karlie?” I ventured.

“You didn’t recognize me because I’ve changed a lot.”

“When I saw you last you were still a kid.” She would be eighteen in three months. I gave her lunch while she worked her way up to telling me why she had suddenly appeared here.

“I never knew him.” She pouted, perching on the edge of my kitchen table, butt two inches from the butter dish.

If I moved it, she would be judgmental. She reeked of discontent and judgment. I stared at her, hoping to read her father in her face, finding him mostly in her body. “But your mother certainly did. You’re proof of that.”

“But… I want to know what he was really like. Ben was two, and even he doesn’t have any real memories. But I wasn’t even born yet!” She sounded affronted.

“Does Stephanie know you’ve come to see me?” When Stephanie chatted on long distance Monday night about her husband and their boutique and her impossible daughter (the one before me, not the nine-year-old Tamara), she said nothing of an impending visit. Stephanie and I always talk of getting together, but we do better on the phone. In person we jar each other.

“What business is it of hers? I travel on my own. I don’t need to ask permission…. Besides, I left a note.”

Her eyes were Stephanie’s but lighter. Her hair was certainly his. I noticed she wore under the tied yellow shirt a Mogen David on a chain. I knew she was not raised Jewish. “What do you want to know, that was worth risking your ass to hitchhike here?”

“I didn’t come alone,” she said reluctantly. “My boyfriend’s at the beach…. What was he like? Oh, don’t tell me he was brave and political and a hero and all that shit. I’ve grown up with him, like some stupid icon you burn candles in front of, like Agios Georgios killing the dragon on the wall at Grandma’s. I can’t stand it! He wasn’t thinking about me when he got himself killed, and here I am saddled with him forever!”

“Why me? And won’t you have more cheese? Another bagel?” Friends
brought them to me from New York and I froze them. If I’d known Karlie was coming, I’d have given her a shopping list.

“The Lightning Elegies—they’re to him?”

“Did Stephanie tell you that? No. To somebody else.”

“Well, because it says the guy died too young.”

“They were to a woman who died even younger. Another friend.”

“Oh…. But you were his big affair, right? That’s what I’ve picked up, around.”

“We were friends, Karlie. Friends from the time we were sixteen. When I was your age, he was my best friend.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

D
ONNA
C
ALLS
I
T
S
LUMMING,
J
ILL
C
ALLS
I
T
D
OWN-
H
OME

I
CAN REMEMBER when Ann Arbor felt marvelous, a book of a thousand pages containing all I did not know and longed to. Now it is merely a small city whose least collegiate sections I prefer, the Black and working-class blocks that remind me of Detroit. I am corresponding with Alberta and planning to move to New York in June. The green pastoral hills of Ann Arbor bore me.

I am strolling along Ashley with money heavy on my mind, four hundred dollars to be exact, when dead ahead of me on the sidewalk outside a bar known as a towny hangout I see him, Donna’s rapist. As I turn to avoid him and his friends, it infuriates me. Why should his presence force me off a sidewalk in broad daylight? I walk on toward the three men. A moment later I begin to regret my bravado. One of the guys, his black hair preened into a Presley pompadour, is looking at me. He wears a style that is absolutely a class uniform: Levi’s, black leather jacket with studs, motorcycle cap. Nobody at the university dresses that way. He stares straight at me and to the rapist he says, “Hey, Buddy, you better run for it. Here comes the broad that beat you up.”

“Aw, shit, Kemp, she didn’t do nothing. I didn’t want to hit her, that’s all.”

By the time I realize they are not going to let me slip by, it is too late to do anything but persist. After all we grow out of the same street life. I can’t act chicken any more than they can. I have two seconds to figure out a defense, and that must issue from my emotional boil which is closer to anger than fear. “Yeah, Buddy,” I say but keep eye contact with the leader. He was driving the car that day. “You’re a big headache to me. You knocked my cousin up. She’s supposed to marry her boyfriend and she’s in a lot of trouble because of what you made her do.”