Listening to Billie (18 page)

Except to think of Miriam, when she should have been working on a poem.

The phone rang.

Eliza was unable not to answer the phone. Remnants of past urgencies, of Catherine’s needs, made her hurry from her desk and across the hall to that jangling black instrument.

At Peggy Kennerlie’s soft proper voice, which she had heard every other day that month, Eliza experienced an extreme, exaggerated irritation; she had only to say, Look, I’m working, I can’t talk. Peggy was silly and demanding but she was not unreasonable. (Was she?) Instead, invitingly (another old habit), Eliza said, “
Hi.
”

“Hi, how are you? Well, you’re not going to believe this, but guess what Ted called about this morning. He wants the grapefruit spoons. I mean, I know they were his mother’s, but honestly, Liza—”

This had been going on for several months, and Eliza, who hated being called Liza, had almost totally run out of interest. When the Kennerlies had first separated, she had been surprised: the Kennerlies not getting along? (Harry said, “Come on, you’re not surprised at all; you’re too smart for that. You were never fooled by all that cornball palsy stuff, were you?”) She went from surprise to sympathy; she called Peggy often, imagining loneliness; she invited her to supper several times. But all Peggy had wanted to talk about was the property settlement; it was her sense of ownership that was outraged.

Weakly, Eliza said, “Oh, grapefruit spoons?” feeling as she spoke a rush of acute annoyance.

Of course, Peggy went on to make it worse. “As a matter of fact, I’m in town right now,” she said, “and would it be okay if I came by for a minute? I’ve got some drapery samples that I really want to show you—I’m getting all new. Could you throw some peanut butter on a piece of bread, or something?” And she gave her warm, characteristic slightly out-of-place laugh.

Nothing about any of that was new, and so why did Eliza
say furiously, “No, Peggy, for Christ’s sake, I’m working.”

“Working? What do you mean?”

“I’m writing, for God’s sake. And I don’t feel like drapery samples, or grapefruit spoons.”

“
Well.
” Peggy tried to laugh in her old accustomed way. That failed, and she said exaggeratedly, “Well, I’m
sorry.
” But then, from her prim puritanical mouth, this broke out: “Jesus, Liza, don’t you ever do anything you don’t want to do?”

“Peggy—Christ, what a question.” But, saying that, Eliza’s voice cracked.

As did Peggy’s as she said, “Well, then. Goodbye.”

They both hung up, and just as after her last argument with Catherine, Eliza found that her hands were trembling. She felt near tears. And
why?
This was how she used to feel after early wrenching scenes with Josephine. Hopelessly she thought, I am unable to argue decently with anyone, but I
have
to, obviously, especially with people who get in the way of my working, even if it is a daughter, a mother, an old friend.

Outside, the rain had slackened momentarily, leaving an empty sad gray sky above the Bay and barely visible Marin; everywhere water dripped, and slid down the smooth surfaces of gutters and the slick bark of trees.

And Eliza went on thinking, staring out. Some people, women, were good fighters, she thought. Josephine, Kathleen—and for the first time certain basic similarities between those two occurred to Eliza—or did she simply react to both of them in the same way, with fear?

Why could she never tell Kathleen, for example, how much she disliked her smoking?

Feeling defiant, Eliza dialed the familiar number. “Hello, Kathleen?”

She was greeted with an outburst that even for Kathleen was violent. “
Well.
I suppose you think that’s really neat, fixing it up with Miriam and Lawry. Or was it one of your upper-class jokes? Do they both report in to you now, Miss Super-Cunt?
Does Lawry tell you that black snatch is really the greatest, and Miriam going on about white cock?”

“Kathleen.” Eliza was surprised to find herself quite calm. “Kathleen, I literally do not know what you’re talking about.”

“Okay,
Mrs.
Quarles, are you going to tell me you didn’t give Lawry Miriam’s phone number?”

“I have truly never spoken to Lawry in my life.”

“Then how the fuck did he get it?” Kathleen’s voice had only slightly subsided.

“Any number of ways. From the business office, for one. From one of the interns she knew. Come on, Kathleen, how many big black girls named Miriam work over there?”

As Kathleen was thinking that out, Eliza battled her own curiosity, and then gave in. She asked, “What makes you think he found her? That they got together?”

Kathleen snorted. “Easiest thing in the world. Miriam hadn’t shown up for a week or so. And one day I decided to call Lawry in L.A.—I hadn’t heard from him, but that was nothing new. And guess who answered his phone. Black Beauty, right? Of course she hung up as soon as she heard me.”

“Well.” There was little or nothing more for Eliza to say.

Or for Kathleen, who only muttered, “All I can say is she’s welcome to him. What a wimp that Lawry is—they really deserve each other. And he’d be a lot worse with money. Selfish, spoiled and vain—they’ll be fighting over the mirror. But Christ, the nerve of that black cunt—”

Eliza at last got back to work.

A few days later a gaudy postcard came to Eliza, from Las Vegas. In Miriam’s beautiful handwriting, her impossible grammar and spelling. Translated, it went, “Dear Eliza, this Vegas is something else, I mean. And Lawry is really nice. I like him a
lot. Don’t tell Kathleen, she don’t know anything. With best wishes from your friend, Miriam.”

Miriam—Las Vegas? This jarred Eliza, and then it made her smile, if a little sadly, and as in a vision she saw Miriam walking into a club, at night, toward a spotlit table. Miriam in tight satin, with high white boots, a dream outfit. Miriam standing up tall, and beautiful, with flowers in her hair.

By April, when Catherine’s baby was due, Catherine was living in Mendocino, with “some friends,” with no phone. At unpredictable intervals she called her mother, usually prompted by a frantic postcard from Eliza, who tried to restrain herself—but sometimes an unanticipated maternal anxiety broke through. By the first of May, Eliza found that she was writing postcards every day.

She thought a great deal, really obsessively, of that coming child, who she believed would be a girl. She thought of that line of females, seeing it as an actual line: Josephine, herself, Catherine and now the new baby, a new person. A succession of powerful women, often at war with each other. Daria was somewhere off to the side, not herself a mother, and preoccupied with troubles of her own.

Eliza thought, too, of how young she herself was to become a grandmother, only a couple of years from forty. And Josephine, to be a great-grandmother in her vigorous late fifties? Eliza almost resented the new titles that Catherine was giving them; she almost resented that new woman-to-be.

On a day in the second week in May, Eliza made two phone calls: one to an inn in Mendocino where once she stayed with Harry; another to the Greyhound terminal. And she wrote her final postcard to Catherine: “Cat, I’m coming up to the Little
River Inn. Have dinner with me tomorrow night if you’re not busy with a baby or anything. Love. E.”

The highway north of the Golden Gate Bridge was too familiar to Eliza for notice as the big bus pressed ahead, and at first she read from a paperback novel—as best she could. But then, sometime past San Rafael, the very idea of “north” became exciting, simply the direction. And, understanding this, Eliza smiled, because of course she was thinking of Maine, of going north to Maine. And how Harry would be amused at that.

She was also thinking of babies; she saw a particular new fat blond baby girl. Was it possible that she could imagine Catherine’s child, who was possibly already born? Both were possible, but actually the baby in her mind was Catherine: Catherine just born to Eliza, and instantly adored—although not adored by her father, who seemed both frightened and vaguely repelled by this noisy new infant. Evan.

But Catherine could have a dark child; she had, Eliza believed, at some time mentioned the father: “Really beautiful, with this blue-black hair.” Eliza saw, or conjured up, a baby who was dark: a tiny one, screaming, in a pink-trimmed white wicker basket. It was Daria, tended by a nurse and regarded with a kind of distraught alarm by Josephine—who felt, at thirty, too old for this, who already hated her husband, Jason Paulus. A baby regarded with some distaste by Eliza, who was ten, a bookish, nonmaternal little girl. Daria cried her lungs out, and no one knew what to do, until the nurse picked her up. A Scottish nurse, Mrs. Barnes. “She wants her lunch, poor mite. Have you ever seen such a small thing so starved?”

At Cloverdale the lumbering bus turned westward, into hills, past fields and meadows, toward the coast. Eliza watched everything, paying attention; like someone reading, she intently
followed the lines of trees, the gray houses, fields, sheep and outcroppings of rock that were the shape of sheep.

The coast, as they emerged to it—turning up to the right, up north—was glorious: green meadows of wildflowers, all yellow and blue, with orange California poppies—meadows that stretched to sheer sudden cliffs of eroded rock and then dropped dramatically down to the sea, the brilliant Pacific, which that day was the deepest azure.

Eliza’s room at the inn had just that view, a flowering meadow framed by dark bent cypresses. She sat on her porch and watched a haze of afternoon sunlight out on the water. She sipped some wine, and waited for Catherine.

Who arrived earlier than Eliza would have expected: Catherine, huge and exhausted, stringy-haired, looking pitifully older than her actual eighteen. They embraced, they greeted each other, and Eliza asked if Catherine was hungry. Would she like an early dinner: Yes, actually she was starved.

During their meal, in the inn’s pleasant dining room, Catherine consumed two orders of abalone and instructed her mother in Lamaze. The exercises, the breathing, the necessary friend in the delivery room. This last was all set, although at first the hospital had made a fuss, Catherine triumphantly recounted. She seemed to have spent the last several months studying obstetrics, and she spoke familiarly of effacement and dilation, episiotomies and presentations; Eliza felt both ignorant and very slightly bored.

“How was I born? What method?” Catherine wanted to know.

“Well, in 1950 natural childbirth was the thing to do, and so I tried it, but it didn’t work out too well.”

“Of course not,” Catherine pronounced. “It wasn’t thorough enough. It was really just a guilt trip that some English guy laid on women.”

After dinner Catherine was terribly sleepy, and said that
she would go on home. Her house was less than half a mile away. They agreed to meet in the morning: Catherine would come for breakfast, and then they would take a walk.

That night, very calmly, with no irritation at all, no self-pity or disappointment, Eliza decided that she was unnecessary to this birth: Catherine, or Catherine and her friends, could perfectly cope. And she, Eliza, the grandmother-to-be, would take the bus back to San Francisco.

At breakfast Catherine had a small steak and potatoes and fried eggs; she announced that she was feeling terrific, she really dug being pregnant. Perhaps this would be a ten-month baby? Would be especially handsome and well developed? Eliza agreed; yes, he-she certainly could be. But privately she considered the stronger possibility that Catherine, with all her new medical knowledge, could quite well have miscalculated the date of conception; she had never been good at arithmetic.

It was another dazzling, beautiful day. They walked in the meadows, among the yellow broom, blue lupin, the orange poppies.

“Where do you live, exactly?” Eliza asked.

“Oh, it’s over there. Actually, it’s not much of a house.”

Eliza took the afternoon bus home, and it seemed to take much longer than the six hours of getting to Mendocino.

She had been in her own house for less than an hour, had washed her face and heated some leftover soup, when the telephone rang. It was Catherine’s friend, her Lamaze partner—a girl who sounded about twelve years old. Who said that he was born:
he
; Catherine had had a nine-pound boy, “with
this terrific thick black hair, and she didn’t have a bad time at all—her water—the doctor—her milk—” Catherine would call Eliza tomorrow.

Most unexpectedly, and for the first time in her life, Eliza was hysterical, truly out of rational control; she laughed and cried together, as she had read that hysterical people did, and at the same time she was watching herself, and she felt ridiculous.

Out of rational control: she was seized with strong impulses, which she acted on. From the refrigerator she took a big cold bottle of champagne. (Harry had what he called “a vulgar taste for French bubbly,” and he kept her supplied.) She opened the wine, thinking that she had never opened a bottle of champagne before, certainly never drunk it by herself, as she then did.

Glass in hand, she went over to the record player; she put on old favorites. Billie, Bessie Smith, Lena Home.

All that music sounded jubilant, and stirring; she could not sit still and drink her wine and listen. She began to move all around the downstairs of her house, in time with the livelier songs, in a very private swaying little dance. And she thought, I am dancing a Grandmother Dance. Thought, Have I finally gone mad? But of course she had not; what she felt was wonderful—happiness, relief.

The Grandmother Dance was something that Eliza never told anyone about, not even Harry. There was no way to describe it.

The baby boy, named Dylan, Dylan Quarles, was exceptionally handsome; as Catherine said, he looked just like his father.

And by the time of his first birthday, Catherine was pregnant again, by another “really beautiful” boy.

It was much too hot to sleep. Eliza, whose fortieth birthday it would be the following day, and Harry (this trip was his present) lay untouching and far apart on their new, very hard, and preposterously wide bed—in August, in Ixtapanejo. Too hot even to make love; instead they talked through most of the night, murmuring against the heavy tropical stillness.