Looking for Mr. Goodbar (4 page)

Theresa saw the tears return to her sister’s eyes before she felt them in her own.

“Not just that you were thinner . . . you were so skinny . . . poor baby . . . it was more than that. Your face. You looked a hundred years old. So old and wise. I remember thinking, Holy Mother, I only asked you to keep her alive, not to make her old!” Katherine burst into tears for the second time that night. Theresa wanted to tell her to stop but she was too choked up, and besides, she wasn’t sure which she wanted Katherine to stop—talking or crying. “I’ll never forget it,” Katherine said, sobbing. “You looked as though you’d died and come back, Tessie, that’s the truth!”

And finally Theresa could hold it in no longer. She sat, her back against the headboard, not moving, crying silently. Katherine leaned over, resting her head in Theresa’s lap, sobbing loudly.

“From then on I always had the feeling,” Katherine said after a long time, her voice muffled, “that whatever I said, you knew the real truth. But I wasn’t scared. I knew you wouldn’t tell. I always felt there was this good thing between us, even if we hardly ever talked to each other.”

Theresa stroked Katherine’s hair. She was feeling a mixture of emotions so strong that she was trembling—a nearly overwhelming love for her sister, a desire to hold her, soothe her, at the same
time as she felt guilty over her dislike and mistrust of Katherine. But then beyond those feelings was the fact that she hadn’t really lost that mistrust. Of her sister. Of this situation. What was Katherine trying to do to her, anyway? It was like someone you knew was an escaped murderer or something showed up at your door and got you to feel all sympathetic and concerned for them to escape. Except Katherine hadn’t really done anything like that. Or had she? She kept reminding herself she didn’t trust her sister while remembering the feeling of the sobs that had racked Katherine’s body.

“Stop,” she said.

Katherine looked up. “What?”

“Nothing,” Theresa said. “I don’t know. I have a headache.”

“Do you want some aspirin?” Katherine’s mascara had streaked all over her face.

“No.”

“I want a cigarette. Do you ever smoke, Theresa?”

“Once in a while.” Now why did she have to tell a lie like that? Actually, she’d meant to try it.

“I’ll go down and get them. I’ll be right back.” But she hesitated, as though afraid to break the bond of feeling between them by leaving the room.

“You better wash your face,” Theresa said. “It’s all streaked.”

Two months later Katherine
married a forty-year-old divorced Jewish lawyer from Boston named Brooks Hendell. Her parents were tight-lipped and upset but felt much better when they’d met Brooks, who was rich, handsome and likable and who when you looked at him, as Mrs. Dunn pointed out more than once, could easily have been a northern Italian. Theresa adored him, as did Brigid.

Brigid was going steady with a wiry, freckle-faced Irish punk named Patrick Kelly of whom her father remarked, upon being
told he was Brigid’s steady, that with Patrick in their house and the Kennedys in Washington, the Irish were finally in their ascendancy. Theresa thought Patrick was a moron but Brigid devoted to going steady with him, to baking Toll House cookies and knitting a sweater for him, that single-minded energy and consuming love which she’d once had for baseball and other games.

It was Katherine who
persuaded them to let her go to City College. The men in the firehouse were telling her father he’d be crazy to let his daughter take a subway into Harlem but Katherine pointed out that thousands of white kids went to City College every day without getting raped or murdered. Katherine said they should be glad to have a daughter smart enough to get into college, and ambitious enough to want to be a teacher. She herself, she said, often wished she had the gumption to go back to school and get a degree. As a matter of fact, she was seriously considering it—and Brooks loved the idea.

On the night before
she was to begin college Theresa took a bath, went back to her room, locked the door, took off her robe, and looked at herself in the mirror. In this light her skin was fair but not deadly; her breasts were round and full; her ten or fifteen pounds of extra weight were concentrated on her hips and thighs and looked quite all right without clothes straining to cover them. When she was naked she generally found her body rather beautiful, although she could never in a million years have admitted this to anyone. In clothes, in front of other people, she felt ashamed of her weight, her sloppiness, always
something,
but it was more because of what she felt
they
saw when they looked at her.

Now she took from the wall a small oval mirror and walked with it to the full-length mirror on her closet door. With her back to the large mirror she held the small one so that she could see her
naked back. A shiny, pale-pink seam ran down the lower part of her spine; near the top curve of her left buttock, the crescent scar where they’d taken the bone for the spinal fusion matched the large seam in color. She shivered. In the six years since the operation she had never looked at her naked back. She returned the small mirror to its place.

It seemed to her that if you didn’t know about her back, if you only saw her naked from the front, you would think she was perfectly all right. The curve of her hip to right was so minute as to be invisible; certainly no one else ever noticed it. She’d never thought about the scar since it had finished healing and the itching had stopped, but now she remembered how for a long time she’d had a sense of it not as a seam in her skin but as a basic part of her. As though the scar itself were her spine, the thing that held her together. During that period she’d sometimes dreamed that she was lying on the ground . . . or, rather, the spine, the scar was lying on the ground and the rest of her was floating off into the air like chiffon veils. But every time the veils were about to float away entirely into the sky to be free, the scar would pull them back to the ground. This night she dreamed a similar dream, except that it was happening in front of the stone building where she’d gone to register for her first courses at City College, and there was a statue looking at her, and people passing by started staring at her because they saw the statue staring. They didn’t understand that it was a person they were looking at. It began to rain so heavily that people screamed and ran for shelter.

She woke up.

Professor Martin Engle was
tall and reed-thin, with curly gray-black hair, a gently sarcastic manner, and beautiful sad eyes, which you didn’t really notice until he took off his glasses and ran a hand wearily across his face. He was a poet and had had a volume of poetry
privately published, as she found out later from two girls in the class, Carol and Rhoda, who were also in love with him.

What will you do, God, when I die?

When I, your pitcher, broken lie:

When I, your drink, go stale or dry?

I am your garb, the trade you ply,

You lose your meaning, losing me. . . .

He asked if anyone in the class hoped to be a writer. Both Carol and Rhoda raised their hands. Professor Engle said there was no reason for anyone to bother to write who didn’t hope to create lines that were perfect, like these. Few would ever succeed, but those not ready to try should give up before they began. Carol and Rhoda looked solemn.

“Having said this,” Professor Engle went on in his rather mournful manner, “I will tell you that it is my aim in this class to teach those of you who are wise enough to know you are untalented—” he paused “—but who say to me, in effect: ‘Professor Engle, I know I’m no writer and never shall be, but I come to you from the public high schools of New York City, illiterate. Teach me to write a simple declarative sentence without risking humiliation . . .’ to teach those of you wise enough to know this is what you require to do exactly that. Are there any questions?”

Most of them sat in their seats, feeling vaguely put in their places without knowing precisely where those places were. Carol and Rhoda looked crushed.

They were to write, in the first person, a brief description of an unpleasant experience. They were not to garnish it with a lot of silly trifles, like Cellophane panties on a lamb chop. Adjectives, where required for clarity, were to be simple and direct: pretty, ugly, green, purple, etc. Doors were to be open or closed, not ajar. There was to be no sunlight spilling through venetian blinds; if anything spilled, it must be liquid. Did he make himself clear? He
stood at the window, looking down into the courtyard. The sunlight spilled through the open window and glinted on his broad gold wedding band.

She wrote a description of going to confession with a new priest who was a drunk. There was something she’d really had to confess, something that had happened that week with a boy she knew, but she could hear the priest’s heavy breathing—almost
smell
him—on the other side of the screen, and when he talked to her his speech was thick from liquor. The booth reeked of cigar smoke. Without seeing him she pictured the way he’d looked at his first mass the week before; he was fat and red and she could see the veins in his nose.

“Bless me Father for I have sinned. I yelled at my mother three times and I ate a big bag of peanuts that was supposed to be for my sisters and everyone.”

He gave her twenty Hail Marys and thirty Our Fathers. She left with the burden she’d carried into the booth.

They were allowed to
look at their papers and then they had to give them back to him.

Good. This is exactly what I asked for.

“Not only is the content excellent, Miss Dunn,” he said as she stood looking at the paper, a pleasurable flush on her cheeks, “but I hereby award you the 1961 Martin Engle Award for Best Penmanship by a Parochial School Student. Public school graduates aren’t even allowed to enter; it would be a waste of their time and mine.”

She felt pleased but also confused, a condition in which he would often leave her, because she’d been praised but somehow mocked at the same time. It wasn’t really
important,
that was the thing. He was doling out great praise for what everyone knew was really a silly insignificant part of the paper. She was annoyed. She was his slave.

He asked her to read the paper to the class; she shook her head. He asked very gently if she would mind his reading it. She consented. When each student had seen his own paper and returned it, he read Theresa’s aloud and asked for comments. There were none. Then he read another whose author he didn’t identify.

“It is 1895,” the paper began. “I have been forced to flee Russia with my family. We are starving. For days now, melting into weeks, we have had almost nothing to eat. We have slept in the hold of this filthy ship, sometimes with bodies that They neglect to remove. Huddled together for warmth, the smell sometimes so bad that I want to vomit.”

Theresa was quite impressed with this dramatic paper and was prepared to hear Professor Engle say that the difference between the two papers was the difference between competence and talent. Then she became aware that, almost imperceptibly at first, then more and more openly, Professor Engle was making fun of the piece. By making it just a little more dramatic than it was meant to be, he was telling the class what he thought of it.

Theresa looked around her surreptitiously. Some of the class looked amused by the performance; others were uncertain or unaware. But Rhoda sat frozen in her seat, fighting tears.

Thank God it isn’t me.

“We are standing on the soil of America at last. I can only pray that this ghastly ordeal will have been worthwhile.”

He put down the paper and looked around the class—avoiding Rhoda, or so it seemed to Theresa.

“Any comments?”

Thank God it isn’t me.

“It’s pretentious,” said a thin-lipped, pretentious-looking boy.

“Mmm. What’s pretentious about it?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said uneasily. “There’s a tone to it . . .”

That wasn’t fair; the tone had been given it by the reading.

“. . . and she pretends to be someone she’s not.”

“Are you trying to say,” Engle asked incredulously, “that a
writer who writes about other people is pretentious? Dickens? Tolstoy? Balzac?” His arms were folded and his manner stern.

“N-no,” the boy floundered lamely, “but—”

“Is there anyone in the class who has something sensible to say?”

But of course everyone was afraid to speak now; the critic had come off somewhere worse than the author.

“Pretentious isn’t the word for this paper, pretendy-ish is more like it.” No one knew exactly what he was talking about. “The problem here is not that the author fails to be true to her own life but that she fails to be true to anyone’s—to life itself.” He quoted again the part about her getting nauseated. “Now for the information of the author, the furthest thing from the mind of someone who hasn’t eaten in several weeks is vomiting. This is not something it takes either brilliance or talent to perceive. It takes only the willingness to get in direct touch with life instead of holding seances with the muse.” His face mostly kept its gentle dreamy look but his lip was curled.

“All this other girl has done is to go directly into life—her own, because she has no grandiose ambitions to be an
artiste
and because that is the easiest and most obvious place to go—and simply record a painful experience.”

Let him never know, God, that it didn’t happen. That we’ve had the same priest for as long as I can remember, pale, thin, dreamy Father Francis, whose sister or mother always wins the washing machine or the TV set at the raffle.

After class she ran out without talking to anybody. Ashamed to face Rhoda. Afraid that if she had any conversation at all with Professor Engle, he would guess at the truth and she would be forever humiliated. She was astounded to see Rhoda there for the next class.