Haunted Houses (8 page)

Christine was to do battle with Peter one night and Edith and Emily took in a movie, Buñuel’s
The Exterminating Angel
. Christine never minded if Emily went out with Edith, because Edith was so much older, but she bristled when Emily wanted to see any of her other friends, and gradually Emily stopped seeing them. She spoke to them on the phone. Edith said nothing about this either. They didn’t go out together often, but Edith especially enjoyed it when they did, especially because Emily could have been her daughter and wasn’t, a fact which meant more to her than she thought it should. She felt a certain irresponsibility, almost collusion with her young tenant. She felt they made a bizarre pair and when they bumped into people Edith knew, she introduced Emily proudly, as my tenant, the poet or the student, a young person who was visibly different from people she had known for thirty years. She wondered if her husband would understand this enjoyment and decided he would. Emily was struck by
The Exterminating Angel
, figuring it had to do with neurosis in general, and that maybe she too couldn’t leave her room in the way that Buñuel meant. You think there’s something out there and there isn’t, except for what you think is there stopping you. She turned to Edith as they entered the dark apartment and quoted Kafka. “My education has damaged me in ways I do not even know.” Edith argued briefly, defending the necessity of education, then let it go, glad that she didn’t think about Kafka anymore, and never had just before bed.

Emily wrote a poem about receiving and sending letters that was so romantic it surprised her. She was aware of this tendency in herself, but it was usually mixed like a salad dressing with a lot of other tendencies and wasn’t so naked. The naked truth: the oil separates from the vinegar. She laughed and shoved it into the drawer she optimistically called To Be Published, and shut it. She never showed her work to anyone, although she didn’t consider herself a secret writer. She said she wasn’t ready and squirreled her poems away keeping them to herself even keeping them from Christine. It was another thing they fought about. You’re not a writer, Christine intoned, if your work sits in a drawer and no one sees it. When it’s ready I’ll show it, Emily would respond, as if her drawer were an oven in which her poems were baking. Christine and Emily fought and made up, fought and made up. Generally, they fought about intangibles, the ineffable. When Emily realized that she hadn’t seen one of her very closest friends in nearly a year, she startled, called her, and made a date. Christine acted like a lover betrayed. Emily went anyway. You don’t have to obey her, her other friend told her. I don’t understand what she wants from me, Emily added, to which her friend countered, What do you want from her?

Are we lesbians and we don’t know it, Emily deliberated when walking home, walking fast to speed up her thoughts. Her mind sorted things back and forth, a shovel digging up stuff and separating it into discrete piles. Except nothing was discrete. She’d been too demanding. On the other hand, I can’t stand it when she disappears for weeks with a new guy. That means I’m possessive about her too. She felt as if she were in a cave and she had always hated the dark. She visualized herself: a child, lying in bed, the blanket up to her eyes, no light in the hall, no light anywhere. What bothered her most was that there was no way to determine right and wrong, or to determine if those categories applied to relationships. She supposed that this was what was meant by mystery. They made up, they made up as they always did. They spent as much time as they could together. Movies, bars, school. They went to see
Persona
. When the two actresses’ heads merged, Emily screamed. Several people turned to look at her. You’re so emotional, Christine teased. Me? Emily asked, defensively, deciding in her mind that poets should be, a thought she kept to herself hopefully.

For Emily was hopeful, it was astonishing how much hope she had, Edith reflected as she washed the dishes, carefully drying the paper towels though she knew Emily thought that was cheap. Emily hadn’t grown up during the Depression. Edith always thought that thought and sometimes decided that that thought might be too convenient for all the questions it was supposed to answer. Well, it certainly was a part of it, she continued to herself as she put each dish away in the yellow cupboard. This was a rent-controlled apartment and she blessed the day she’d moved in, a young woman, with a husband and two small children, over twenty years ago. Finding herself staring at the cupboard, she shut it, conscious that the way her arm moved now was the way it moved then. She was never going to move. She could be very stubborn; her husband could have attested to that. And her children. “They’ll have to take me away,” she had said to her husband, who had been a sociologist. “You can’t stop change, Edith,” he had answered. “I’m not stopping it, I’m just not going to be a party to it.” Then, she remembered, he’d touched her on the arm and laughed. He had such a wonderful laugh, Edith thought, and left the kitchen,

“Makeup”—Christine smiled—“makes some of my imperfections more obvious. More perfect.” They had just eaten an enormous bowl of salad and tuna fish. “I like you without makeup,” said Emily, who wore less of it, or none. Emily was considering letting her eyebrows grow in. First, she thought she looked too much like Bette Davis playing Queen Elizabeth. Second, they looked like parentheses on her forehead. “I look like a clown.” “Of course you don’t,” Christine insisted. “Your face is perfect.” They smiled at each other over the big bowl. “Dare I eat a peach or wear my trousers rolled?” Emily mimicked. Christine smiled again, encouragingly—Emily had had a man over the night before—“let them grow,” she urged, as if growing one’s eyebrows signified activity.

It was Valentine’s Day, a fact the two young women noted, cynically, over the tuna fish, mentioning having received valentines when they were young, in grade school, Emily remembering her love for Peter. Dressing up. Kissing games. My mother taught me never to lie. She’d received this day a card from Richard, who was in Italy, driving around the hill towns. With someone, probably, she commented to Christine. Emily did not want to talk about last night. It was disappointing. Oddly enough, Edith had had a man over the night before too. Emily had gone in the back door—the maid’s entrance—and Edith had used the front one, as she always did, so, in a sense, they had missed each other. Emily heard a man’s voice in the morning. Edith saw a cigarette on her dining-room table. Both were made aware, but neither spoke of it. It was something they didn’t enter into with each other. Emily would never discuss sex with Edith, that was reserved for Christine. The subject with Edith was skirted; she amused herself with the image. We pull in our skirts so as not to appear like flirts. Emily never wore skirts anyway, which her mother found difficult to digest, like Mexican food. “And she always wears the same things,” she complained to her husband. “Those army pants that are falling apart. And she never tells us about her boyfriends. If she has them.” Her parents couldn’t decide which was worse—her having them or not having them. Emily’s father threw up his hands like an evangelist enlisting God’s aid. “It’s not normal,” he said. Both parents shook their heads in unison.

“My mother walked right out of the room when I walked in.” Emily was reporting to Edith about her latest visit with her parents. “She couldn’t stand the way I looked.” Emily started to cry then stopped, suddenly, just turning it off. A leaky faucet in Edith’s bathroom appeared like a cartoon in the older woman’s mind. She didn’t want to be emotionally involved, she kept telling herself, using those exact words. I do not want to be emotionally involved. The two women walked into Central Park and sat on a large grey boulder that stuck up from the ground, a tough couch for Emily’s sorrows. That’s how life is, Edith kept thinking, she’ll get used to it. Edith restrained herself from saying that your mother can’t help it. She had parents too. But she didn’t say it because she didn’t want to be an apologist for parents. Stretched before her she saw long lines of children and their parents and then their parents and their parents. “It must have been awful at the very beginning of time,” she said, ending her vision. “I’m just thinking out loud,” she told Emily.

They watched walkers and bikers and runners. They stayed for three hours. A civil rights march that had begun in Harlem passed right in front of them. In fact, it stopped in front of them, allowing Nelson Rockefeller to get out of his black limo and join its ranks. He walked by them; he was so close they could have slapped him on the back. Rockefeller forced himself between two black men in the front line whose arms were tight around each other’s backs. Their arms relaxed truculently, and he took his place between them, as if he were born to be there. Emily was astonished at his lack of feelings, maybe it wasn’t a lack of feelings. She was astonished at his wanting to get his own way and knowing that he could and would. She concluded that a great fortune makes people indifferent, imperious. He had acted like an emperor. Emily had nearly forgotten about her mother by the time she opened the door to her small room. The phone rang. Her mother said, “I didn’t realize I could hurt your feelings.”

As for Edith, it was Sunday, and on Sunday she did not want to think about her children and their feelings. She wanted to read
The New York Times
and make herself a sandwich. That night Christine’s mother called her daughter. She called faithfully every Sunday. “Your father left me nothing. I’ll have to work for the rest of my life in a dentist’s office,” recited tonight exactly as it had been done over the years, and responded to by Christine with the same precision. Mixed with the complaints was a sense of the absurd, the absurdity of their situation, mother and daughter, together, against the world, a sensibility that Christine comprehended and inherited, so to speak, rather than money.

Emily never worried about money; they had always had enough and her father wasn’t dead. It irritated but also pleased Christine to be close with someone who didn’t care night and day, day and night, about how she was going to survive. Emily never seemed to think about it. She’s not very realistic, thought Christine, who was herself practical and wary, not the optimist Emily was, not by a long shot. She explained to Emily that she had become a fatalist at an early age. But somewhere Christine comforted herself with the belief that life, like the end of a fairy tale, would present her with a happy ending, a man to support her. It was a belief deep inside her, but being practical she set about to become financially independent. The fantasy was a bas-relief, lifting her slightly above everyday exigencies. It was another thing that Emily didn’t really understand about Christine, this dread of poverty, fueling her friend into action more often than Emily would ever realize.

Still later, Edith read into the night, restless with denial; Christine decided again never to see Peter; and, having buried her mother’s phone call into ground that is not conscious, Emily worked on a poem that began:

Leo strides in a field of men

like a motorcycle passing cars.

She is too different to be used yet.

The cat wears its coat

mindless of any beauty

because beauty is only a word.

Tired and not tired, Emily stopped writing and placed the piece of paper in the drawer, turned off the light, and stared ahead into the dark space that was not completely black. There was light coming from a small window in her bathroom. She always kept the bathroom door open, to let that little bit of light in.

“Y
ou shouldn’t listen to your sisters, Jane, they overpower you.” The woman who said this was undressing as she spoke. She was showing the younger woman how to undress on the beach, European style. “You hold your towel like this, then you quietly tug at your pants.” Jane wanted to say that she was never even able to open
The New York Times
the right way on the train, but skipped it, thinking the Hungarian woman wouldn’t get it, and said instead, “I didn’t bring my bathing suit anyway.” She was back up the scale again. She would never get undressed on the beach, but she didn’t tell Sinuway that.

They had taken the subway to a Brooklyn beach that Sinuway went to often. The Hungarian woman had had a sister who died during the 1956 uprising. She told Jane, “You are lovely too, so was my sister, exquisite,” then gave Jane a small round mirror with odd markings on the back which she said Jane was to look into to know that she was a fine woman. Jane thought Sinuway was talking out of a novel. She had, though, gotten all her clothes off without any skin showing. The older woman said many things that the younger one listened to but would not hear until years later, and then like an echo.

Sinuway had wild, coarse red hair, perhaps all her features were coarse, and to Jane she was both plain and exotic, living in a tiny apartment on St. Mark’s Place, speaking from experience about the world. She said she was going to marry a professor but Jane never met him. It was conceivable that he didn’t exist, or that he was part of Sinuway’s book, or her mind, so foreign to Jane.

Despite the meaning of her name, “one who walks alone,” Sinuway gathered people to her. Besides Jane there was Carl and occasionally Jimmy, Jane’s childhood love. Carl lived across the street from Sinuway and was crippled. He had an angel’s face, thin and dark, like a study by Leonardo, Sinuway would say, and his legs dragged behind him. Jane wanted to be in love with Carl because he was crippled; she wanted to be able to be in love with him, but she wasn’t.

Jane passed time with the Hungarian woman and Carl. “Let’s go to a castle,” Sinuway exclaimed. “Where?” “In New Jersey.” “There’s a castle in New Jersey?” “Would I say let’s go to a castle if there wasn’t a castle? Are you thinking I’m crazy, Jane?” Jane was always thinking everyone was crazy. “No, let’s go. What do you think, Carl?” Carl had a small white car specially built for him. The three of them just fit into it, Jane sitting on the ledge, Sinuway getting the guest of honor’s seat, as she called it, “because I’m the oldest.” As the youngest in her family, Jane never expected to become the oldest anywhere. “You have much to learn, little one,” Sinuway said, annoying Jane. Still, when Sinuway spoke in her accented English, every syllable had more meaning.