The Bride of Catastrophe (18 page)

“
You're
not the mother!” he said. Startled by the truth this touched on, we all drew back for a minute and Teddy rushed on into his hysteria.

“You can't go, I'm not letting you go,” he said, grabbing Ma's shirt and pulling at it as if he could physically stop her. He'd have done the same thing if she'd been going out for milk, but, for once, it was fitting. I felt his panic rise in myself too.

“Stop it!” I said, taking him by the shoulders. “Stop it right now, do you hear me?” I looked into his face with cold fury, thinking that really it was my mother who ought to stop it, that it was cowardly of me to be yelling at Teddy instead of her.

“
Stop
pulling at me! Let go!” Ma swatted at Teddy as if he were a bat that was clinging to her clothes.
“Let me go!”

He let go, and stood there roaring, “I hate you,
I hate you
, you take me with you or I'm going to…” He stopped, teeth gritted, eyes wild. What recourse was there? “I'm going to hit my head, hit my head,” he screamed, slapping at his head with the flat of his hands.

Pop, still on his knees at the fireplace, bent into himself suddenly, silently, like a monk in flames. “I can't do this, I can't do this,” he wept.

“No, you can't do anything, can you? You never could,” Ma said with cold, final contempt, while Dolly knelt to comfort him, looking up at her with venom.

“That's right, take care of
him
,” Ma said to her. “Did he ever take care of you? Did he think one
minute
of your well-being? Do you really imagine he wants to have you with him, except maybe because it hurts me?
‘Oh, my children, my children,'”
she mocked. “As if he had
ever
thought of his children before! My god, he tried to
kill
me when I was carrying Beatrice. When you fell out the window, Dolly, when you were two years old, he didn't want to pay the hospital bills, he'd have let you lie there with your leg broken.”

He'd probably said something like: “Her leg can't be broken.” Ma made something awful of everything, after all. But then he didn't seem to hear anything until it was shouted. He was cruel in ways no one else would notice, she had to make the scars herself.

“
I
watched over you,” Ma went on, quiet now because she was saying the simple truth. “I was there for you, I carried you up and down the stairs for weeks. Choose him, then, go with him, but…” We listened. She was artful, she was always shaping whatever happened to suit her more fully, and if she'd used that extra dimension to work her life into a play or a painting, who knew; instead, though, she lived it out. Her voice turned to acid. “Don't expect my sympathy when you realize what you've done.”

This made a good finish and she sat down, but the rage welled up and pushed her to her feet again.

“
Your
children?” she said to Pop. “Your children. Well, what about my
home
?
What about my life?
What did you do with that? Look at me, all this time I was patient, I told myself you were trying your best, I thought, ‘Don't stand between a man and his dream,' even though you were dreaming of
ping-pong balls!
While you gambled with everything I had, and lost. And my youth is gone and what do I have to show for it,
nothing
.” She spat the word “nothing,” then repeated it tenderly, comforted by it in some deep way. “Nothing at all.”

And very, very calmly, as if she'd gotten her anger out and was returning to our task, packing these last few things, preparing to leave, she picked the globe up and carried it over to the fireplace. Teddy, astonished that his tantrum had not provoked the usual response, stopped crying and kept still with the rest of us, watching her.

“Everything I loved, gone,” she said, sounding portentous, nearly Shakespearean. And then: “Everything,” quietly, kneeling beside Dolly, laying the globe on the fire gently as if putting a baby down for its nap.

“Claire!” Pop said, but it was too late. The globe filled with fire, glowing like a rising sun for a minute before it fell in on itself and went gray.

*   *   *

“
WAIT!
”
I
said. I didn't know what to say next. My reflex was to keep Ma there a few more minutes and hope the centrifugal force of family would pull her back in.

She turned, irritated, curious, and, I could see, hopeful. I was the worldly one, the one who could always put things back together, what with my brilliance and my college education. If I'd said, right then: “Sit down and stop being silly. We need to put our heads together and work things out…” In fact, if I'd said
anything
in a tone of confident authority, I might have wound back time so the world bloomed out of the fire again and my mother took it up like a baby and they reconciled over its sweet head.

But seeing the hope on her face, I only wanted to dash it. Let it happen, the thing they'd been threatening all these years, threatening each other with as if they didn't know we felt it too. Let it come, let them see the consequences of their drama. Let them live in the world they'd made.

Oh yes, I knew what I wanted to say. When you take a person who has been nurtured in a climate of total hysteria, then pour her mind full of Great Literature with its pithy phrases, you may, reader, have created a monster. I faced my dear family as I was, stuck full of all the barbs from all the years, engorged with my education, ready to speak from—yes, my heart. It was a terrible thing to see.

“There's something I feel I ought to tell you, while we're all together here.” I'd spent long enough cowering in a walk-in closet with these people, fearful so Ma wouldn't be alone in fear. I was getting out, I was going to blow the door right off.

“I'm a lesbian,” I announced, in a voice that sounded strangely of TV-movie-heroine. Thank you for the tour of Russia, Mother, and the side trip to Pamplona. Now for the Greek Isles—there she is now, fair Sappho at her lyre.

The room went, finally, silent. Ruin, betrayal, heartbreak, divorce, poverty, despair—and one globe in flames—were forgotten, and all faces turned to me.

“I've
always
known it,” I continued, trembling, fervent (every one of my mother's inflections was turning out to be useful). “
Now I see
—but it's only just come clear to me. I'm in love with a woman, I love her body, I
love making
love to her, and I'm not ashamed to say it. I'm
proud
to be a lesbian.”

Dolly was looking very confused and Teddy had started repeating his times tables, but I had, for once, my parents' full attention. Philippa barged into my thoughts, gesticulating wildly in an effort to quiet me, but I showed her the door. I
did
love and want her, I did … and coincidentally, I wanted to slice my parents up with the very sharpest thing I could find.

I might have asked:
How can you have lied so, all your lives—pretending you knew what you were doing when really you were utterly lost, pretending you watched over your children when your children were watching over you?
But this was ever so much more deadly. It said:
You don't know me, in fact you don't know anything. If you're disappointed because I love a woman, well then, you're a small-minded prig, probably a racist, maybe even a Republican
. And:
Do you really think that anyone who saw
your
example would be interested in heterosexual love?

I watched them like an assassin, to be sure my knife had struck the vein. After a few beats—our family equivalent of a long silence—my mother said in her voice of absolute loving tolerance, under which lay the same sentimentality I'd just put to use myself:

“I believe that love comes to each of us in his own way. How can there be such a thing as a ‘bad' love?” (This a subject she felt quite strongly about of late.) “No—and even if so, I would
never
try to dictate my own children's choices…” Shooting that look that meant:
“Unlike Herr Goebbels over there.”

“We'll support you in whatever you do, honey, of course,” he said, very quickly so he wouldn't have to think about it anymore. No, I thought, it didn't matter whether I was hetero or homosexual, whether I moved to Rome or Detroit, pursued a career as a prostitute or a judge—as long as he didn't have to see.

“Follow your heart,” my mother said vaguely, and went off into the night, in pursuit of hers. Teddy sat stunned like the rest of us, watching her go.

“We'd better get to bed,” Dolly said, as Ma's headlights swept over the room. “We've got to get up tomorrow.”

Pop broke the fire up with the poker—trying to avoid looking at me, I thought—and the three of them went upstairs quietly, huddled together. I gave them the creeps. But then, I always had. I'd hurt them by going to school, by liking my teachers. When I asked for that yogurt, Ma just knew I was implying that some other, yogurt-eating person was better than she. But I needed to eat yogurt, lots of it, to keep up my strength, because every day there was the quiet pressure—Did I really like school so much that I wouldn't rather be home with my family? Did I really want to play with those children whose parents no doubt detested Ma, maybe almost as badly as she did them? What if I became like them, what if I broke the magnetic field around our family, and escaped?

But no simple friendship was going to accomplish such a feat—to do that, to really go beyond them, I needed a much more dangerous force; I needed to fall in love.

Sylvie had gone home to the trailer—little Springtime needed his walk and she didn't like to let him out alone because Butchy's neighbor let his dogs run wild. She'd left Butchy's leather jacket hanging over the stair rail, and I picked it up and held it as if it belonged to someone I loved terribly, who had died. It was big, to cover the wide shoulders of a man whose body was grown thick from work. It smelled of leather and oil and probably Butch himself, of the strength and safety a man can offer. That man was lost from our lives but he lived in our dreams, like the lost chord.

The room was dark except for the last embers in the fireplace, and outside, Jupiter was brightening in a band of azure over the crest of the hill. I was seeing this for the last time, and it made me feel strangely light—the empty house, the ruined hopes, the disaster finally upon me. I was young, I was just beginning; if I had nowhere to go, it only meant I could go wherever I liked. I slipped Butch's jacket on with a thrill, feeling myself tall and solitary, a sailor in a new port—a man, who can move in the world, and so, turn his back on love and walk away. Ma and Sylvie yearned for that man—they were both out hunting him now. Well, I was not going to search for him, pray for him, suffer for him, like they did. I was going to become him.

Part Two

One

M
OVING TO
Hartford was
in no way
tantamount to falling off the edge of the earth. Certainly not. I'd never been there, of course. New York was our city of reference, and we had the vague feeling that the roads marked for Hartford might, while not exactly falling off the edge of the earth, lead to a void all the same. No,
we
(the overweening, familial “we”) did not go to Hartford; therefore
I
(self-made, rigged up out of bits of yarn and whatever) would move there, make my way in a real place, a place ruled not by a communal fantasy, but by supply and demand. I had about six hundred dollars in the bank, or less, actually, thanks to the Nancy Kissinger shoes. And my father had done some calculations on the back of an envelope, concluding that in Hartford I could get by on a hundred a week, while in New York, I'd need a thousand.

“No more than a quarter of that for housing, of course,” he'd said, very knowledgeably.

I'd felt a little spring bubble in my heart then. The advice I'd had from him before was to take smaller steps, smaller bites, speak more softly, keep from raising my hand at school—try, in other words, not to act like the appalling chimera my mother was fashioning me to become. I caused a disturbance at the edge of his mind, and he'd wanted to help me quiet down so he could bear me. But being famished, desperate to get somewhere, and terrified no one would hear me over the general cacophony, I'd been unable to obey his injunctions. I'd disappointed him, he was going away, but in spite of his troubles, he'd stopped to puzzle this out for me. This envelope with his hasty figuring proved his fatherly concern.

*   *   *

“
FIRST AND
last, and one hundred security,” said my new landlord, whose English was clotted with Polish gutturals, though he'd lived in the U.S. for thirty years. His name was Frank Prysznyrsny (pronounced
Pri-sneers-nee
), and his wife Henny shadowed us as he showed me the apartment, muttering with worry and suspicion as he demonstrated the makeshift shower and slid the tiny windows up and down in their jambs. Every time he spoke English, she shook her head and gazed heavenward as if ashamed of such affectation, and when I mentioned the lack of radiators, she gave a
“pffft!”
of disgust and explained in angry sign language how to shut off the front room and move the bed in next to the stove. The place had been their attic, but Frank had painted it (floors, walls, and ceilings, with a vivid aqua enamel that I imagined he'd gotten at a very good price) and put in the bathroom and kitchenette. I was their first tenant. As Frank smoothed the lease for my signature, Henny erupted in a cascade of anxious
zh
- and
y
-filled sentences, but he shook his head and hunched his shoulders, making a duck's back against her.