Haunted Houses (13 page)

Edith watched their relationship like a mother cat who is no longer feeding her kittens. She knew trouble when she saw it, but there was no way, hardly even the words with which to broach the subject with Emily, who was more sensitive than she had ever been. Allowed to be more sensitive. For certainly if Edith had grown up in a household where there had been more money, she might have been gentler, she thought. In a way that Edith couldn’t fathom, Emily could sense her, knew when to avoid her, or knew how to talk with her when she didn’t want anyone near her. The quality was remarkable, but there was no future in being sensitive, no future in poetry, or even in prophecy. But children—and Emily was still a child—didn’t think about the future and money, especially Emily, whose father, a lawyer, kept her allowance coming despite any problems he or her mother might have about the way Emily dressed or the people she saw. Probably Ethical Culture—had she said he was a Quaker—Edith thought as she stacked the toilet paper in the utility closet, which took up half the shelf space, but such a bargain and now she wouldn’t have to think about toilet paper for half a year at least. Unless she threw a lot of dinner parties, but she didn’t imagine she would.

The sun came through Emily’s bathroom window and cast light on her face and his. He was sleeping on the floor, on a thin sheet of foam rubber he called his pallet, his bed when he was with her. His guitar was under her bed. When she opened her eyes she saw his black underpants. Bikinis. He slept with his back toward her, his long body below her like a rug of flesh. She’d missed another sixteenth-century poetry class. She grabbed her robe to cover herself. He walked around naked in front of her. Christine said he was a tease. But she hated him anyway. His body. She told herself she didn’t care. Love isn’t like this. She kicked him in the ass. If your people hadn’t left England we might not all want to be famous.

The child educator called on Edith just often enough to satisfy something, but she would never again consider marriage. She admitted to herself that she was comfortable with her life, not content; there were longings. But she liked waking up and going out and answering to no one. There was a way in which feeling loss kept her husband with her, and she didn’t want to give him up. Loss had a shape, a presence she didn’t have to share with anyone. When you get older you don’t want to have to share with anyone. She could be as selfish as she wanted. She walked around the apartment, turning off the lights. All those anymores. Could she raise Emily’s rent two dollars a week to keep up with the electric bills? It’s still a good idea. Edith ran her fingers through her short thick hair. It had never curled when she was a child and now she wore it as she liked it, close to her head, the shape of which she was proud. Her hair was convenient. Like having a woman in to clean the apartment once a week, something she hadn’t done when her husband was alive. Hiring the black woman caused her conflict. Hadn’t she marched for civil rights as early as the forties. Shouldn’t she hire a white woman, but the state employment agency sent her Helen, who was about her age, and Helen needed the work. And why should Edith stand on principle when to do so meant denying this woman a source of income, and by now they’d been together, she and Helen, six years, and how could she have fixed the world by not hiring her. Edith sighed audibly in the empty apartment and left a note for Helen—her son had been sick, maybe heroin, but Edith didn’t ask—and ran her hands once more through her hair. A trace of lipstick still on her lips, she added some more orange and smiled at herself, as if pleased not with her image but with something else that was not pictured.

Helen and Emily met in the kitchen and had some coffee that Edith had left for Helen. Or maybe it was just left over. Helen asked Emily how her poems and painting were going and Emily asked Helen about her son. Emily wondered if Helen really liked Edith, if she could really like her. Not wanting Helen to see Keith lying on the floor, she walked backward into the room, blocking the door as she talked, almost stepping on his head. Helen wanted one of Emily’s paintings and Emily was touched. Helen laughed about it later, Emily walking backward, hiding her guy. White people were so funny. Her son got angry when she said funny. When Helen brought home the painting she’d asked Emily for, to go over the couch, her son walked out of the apartment.

Or so Emily imagined it. Gazing into a mirror, absentmindedly plucking her eyebrows, the disorder on her brow, Emily removed as much of the present as she could. The piano teacher is sitting beside her now on the soft chair she liked so much, her clothes like a garden that needs tending. Full of color and the smell of violets, Hilda’s mouth is slightly open and she is smiling as Emily plays, not too badly, a Bach exercise. As Emily finishes the piece without a mistake, Hilda is almost triumphant. No mistakes. The forest across the street appears, seen again as it was during every lesson. With longing. Her own eyebrows and Hilda’s clothes now resonant of Richard II with those gardening metaphors for bad governing. No mistakes. We can’t make any mistakes. How can I avoid them? Her eyes close and Hilda fades reluctantly and again she wonders where she is right now and.

* *
*

R
emember walking on the sidewalk and jumping over the cracks, and if you lose your balance, if you step on one, something terrible will happen to you. Walking a fine line invisible to anyone but herself, Jane dropped out of college and got a job at Macy’s, in the toy department, where she expected never to see anyone she knew. She was living with her sister again, eating whole wheat donuts for lunch and finishing boxes of chocolate cookies for dinner. Home was a room that was too empty. The chair was uncomfortable. The air smelled bad, like a new apartment, although it wasn’t. The shower didn’t have enough pressure. Next door an alcoholic couple screamed into the night. Jane watched television and wrote in her diary.

If I loved somebody I wouldn’t feel like this. Or if somebody loved me. Sometimes I feel there’s no difference between my body and this chair I’m sitting in. In a funny way I don’t think I exist. Not really. Things just seem to go on and on, with and without me, mostly without me.

Her father’s family, Larry insisted, was full of lively, dramatic people. Melodramatic maybe. The facts about her father’s family were, Jane supposed, not unusual. They arrived in this country and couldn’t speak the language. The oldest brother, born in Russia, escaped on foot, crossing a river on his uncle’s back. The two younger brothers—they are a family of sons—Larry and Marty, her father, were born in America. The family had escaped so that the men wouldn’t have to fight in the Czar’s army. There are then three sons, a flamboyant, perhaps mad mother and a benign father who doesn’t live with them. Kicked out. Or lives with them sometimes. He visits once a week. They cohabit, Larry puts it, once a week. Still, the mother advertises for a husband in the Yiddish newspapers, which none of the sons can read. They are not taught the language, nor are they bar mitzvahed. It’s early in the twentieth century and they want to be Americans. No one knows what an American is and across the Atlantic Gertrude Stein is working on that very problem. But they wouldn’t know this.

From her view behind the Barbie doll counter Christmas was a TV series of family conflicts. A little girl points her finger at a Barbie doll outfit and her mother points to another. “Don’t you want this one?” The little girl looks at the other one. She starts to want both. She can’t make up her mind. Her mother gets angry. “Just choose one. You can’t have them both.” Close up on the child’s face, just about to cry. They buy the one the mother wanted.

The floor supervisor, a young dark-haired man, wears a white boutonniere as all the supervisors do. Some of the salespeople have worked at Macy’s ten (red flower) or twenty (white flower) years. The saleswomen remind Jane of sturdy ships that sail into and out of harbor, the fifth floor, resignation their port of call. Resignation keeps her alert to resignation. Frank, the floor supervisor, flirts with her, giving her knowing, we-shouldn’t-be-working-here looks to which she responds coyly. She decides he’s the one. He will be the man, not Jimmy. She knows him too well, and anyway, he’s just a child. He’s also too skinny.

Grandma Rose wears her hair piled on top of her head. It’s a big mess, always falling down, the combs slipping out. She’s constantly raising her hands to her head to push them back in and it’s always futile. She married her husband in Russia quickly, after the son of the lord who owned the land they worked took a liking to her and wanted to kiss her hand. She gave him her hand but wouldn’t take off her glove because he was a Christian. She was supposed to have been beautiful. Jane tried to imagine her grandmother, who later covered newspapers with towels and bits of cloth to keep the people in the pictures warm, extending a gloved hand to the lord’s son. The two images could be placed side by side, but could not be superimposed to make a whole, and looking from one to the other was like reading two different languages in the same sentence when you don’t know one of them. When she arrived in America, New York, she was a young woman with a husband and child. They lived on the Lower East Side. Larry and Marty are born on Ludlow Street.

Sam Wo’s is not far from the Lower East Side. As usual it’s crowded and as usual Felix was pricking certain ideas that he had said littered the landscape. In his way he was much more romantic than Jane, but not about love, about life, which he wanted to experience madly. Madness bored Jane. She didn’t think that mad people were so great or so beautiful. Felix could talk to her about Artaud until he himself got locked up, she would resist these insights. My grandmother was mad, she told him, but you wouldn’t have wanted to spend time with her. Felix wouldn’t tell Jane anything about his family because his father was a famous artist and he thought that would make a difference. “Why should it make a difference to me?” she insisted. “I don’t want to be an artist.” “It might make a difference to Jimmy,” Felix said. Maybe Jimmy, she considered, he takes his heroes so seriously.

Everything Jimmy read conspired to equip him with outrageous notions about men, himself. Kerouac cut into the heroic grand figure but created another type, the one Jimmy aspired to. Then there was Bob Dylan. If he’d been born in the Midwest, and not Long Island, Jimmy might have had a chance to be either one of those guys. As a European, Felix argued against the tyranny of influence, of tradition, while Jimmy, an American, perceived nothing except for what he chose as influence. And Jane sat between them, stationed in the balance, drinking coffee in Ukrainian restaurants. Their arguments were often about the ineffable and she found herself speechless in the face of Felix’s libertarian absoluteness and Jimmy’s veiled masculine strivings. It was enough to be aware and that, like the Salk vaccine, would protect one from false hope, from bullshit. Jane listened as if from very far away. It seemed to have nothing to do with her.

She tried to visualize her father when he was a little boy. Hazel-eyed, with thick black hair, small for his age, he’s sent by his mother to find coal in the dark basement that may have rats in it. He’s terrified of rats and the dark basement. Being sent there by his mother was terrible, a descent into a children’s hell, the hellish imagination that grows wild when not tended. He was his mother’s favorite, Larry says, and very guilty about it. Is fear catching? Is guilt? Jane wanted to understand the patterns as eccentricities or commonplaces, to understand the ties between siblings and parents, between siblings and each other. She and her sisters, her father and his brothers. Her mother rarely talks about her family except to say that her own mother was perfect. The children of that mother don’t seem to like each other nearly as much as Larry and Marty do, their tie is remarkable, unending, intangible, in the blood, Larry says.

Right after Jimmy woke up, when his face hadn’t set yet, and he’d been up all night on speed, he thought he saw a trace of Bob Dylan. Ouspensky said a man could go mad looking at a broken ashtray, or was it a dirty ashtray, or could it be your own mirror when you look into it to see the person you wish you were. I want to be famous and she wants to be thin. What about the image reflected back at you, yourself in someone else’s mirror, a reflection you don’t recognize. Jane talked about not recognizing herself and together they took hundreds of pictures in photo booths. Jimmy had a few on his mirror. Jane posed in profile, certain that one side off her face was thinner, while Jimmy would drop his down, and look up only with his eyes, a cigarette hanging from his lips, a la Belmondo. He couldn’t understand why she was so attached to her family and bothered to remember or to write down the facts as she knew them, as she put it. He told her that and she said, It’s my family and you don’t have to understand.

One afternoon at Macy’s Jane was visited by a woman she’d barely even heard of, the wife of the Austrian friend of her sister, the one who had thought of her as a Lolita that summer when she was twelve. The visit was unannounced. The woman was small, like the man, and she and Jane drank coffee in the employee cafeteria, sitting at the counter. Jane was on her break. Like her husband, the wife was supposed to be a genius. One of the reasons for their marriage was to produce more geniuses. “We are Skinnerians,” she explained to Jane. “But we don’t work with rats anymore.” The woman looked into Jane’s face, studying it as if it were a maze. She asked if Jane liked her husband. She said with pride that her husband wanted her to meet and like the women he was interested in. “He’s interested in me?” Jane asked. “Because I don’t think of him that way. He’s nice, but I’ve never been attracted to him.” Jane announced her answers the way the woman asked the questions, objectively, disinterestedly. The woman paid both checks and said it was good to meet her, hurrying off to her next case, perhaps. Jane didn’t test well anyway.

To Jane it was all very European, if disturbing, like art films, like
Rocco and His Brothers
and
8½
. Her sister would be furious. Returning to her position behind the Barbie doll counter, she observed Frank as she sold and didn’t sell dolls. She watched him and he watched her. Jane stayed late to find herself alone with him. And once alone, in his office, as he wheeled toward her on the office chair, the recognition of what she was doing shocked her into abeyance, her heart alone giving her life, beating so loudly the room itself seemed alive. The walls were her flesh and she fled.