The Summer Without Men
I did not smile. I remembered.
Poor Peyton, whose remorse was already in full bloom, cried and blew her nose.
Jessie did not look at Alice, but she apologized in a mortified whisper.
Nikki and Joan wriggled with unease.
Ashley and Emma remained implacable.
I sent them off with their assignments. I gave Ashley and Alice to each other, paired Peyton and Joan, Nikki and Emma, and because seven is uneven, I took Jessie for myself, and she was given the task of writing as the mostly ignorant poetry teacher.
* * *
Boris wooed.
Mia,
I was just a fat-headed guy full of pain.
Boris
(Reference: T. R. Devlin, played by Cary Grant, to Alicia Huberman, played by Ingrid Bergman, near the end of Notorious. The hero is, if I remember correctly, carrying his drugged-by-poison beloved down the stairs when he makes this remark. Boris and I had seen the film at least seven times together, and every time B.I. had become tearful over this succinct explanation for Mr. Devlin’s genuinely wretched treatment of the divine Miss Huberman. I was not unmoved by this bit of wooing. No, I won’t hedge: I was moved. It would never do to replace Cary with Boris or me with Ingrid. When I imagine my slightly rotund in the middle, bespectacled neuroscientist puffing and groaning as he bears frizzy-headed fifty-five-year-old versifier down enormous Hollywood staircase, the illusion is lost. But that is not the point. We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.)
* * *
From Bea, after having been informed of the Boris/Mia developments:
Just remember, Baby Huey, we all screw up. Love, B.
* * *
From Nobody, finally:
Kidney stones.
Poor Mr. Nobody, my high-flying partner in dialogue, had been brought down by those excruciating pebbles. I wished him a swift recovery.
* * *
I had learned to wait for some time after knocking for Abigail to appear at the door. My visits had been fairly regular. I had gone either alone or with my mother, and we had both worried about our mutual friend since her fall. She seemed to dwindle daily, and yet, the force of her personality remained strong. In fact, what attracted me to Abigail was her rigidity. This is not usually regarded as a desirable feature in human beings, but in her it seemed to have developed as resistance to a particular midwestern ethos of frightened conformity. Abigail had sewn and embroidered and appliquéd in quiet but adamant insurrection. I now knew the story of Private Gardener. She had married him on an impulse just before he headed off for the Pacific, but when he returned after the war, he brought the war back with him. Plagued by nightmares, fits of rage, and bouts of ferocious drinking to the point of unconsciousness, the man who had come home bore little resemblance to the boy she had vowed to “love, honor, and obey,” but then, as she put it, “I didn’t really know him from a hole in the wall to begin with.” One day, to her immense relief, her spouse went AWOL. A year later, she received a letter of contrition from the ex-soldier asking her to join him in Milwaukee. Because the very thought of it turned her “cold as an ice cube,” Abigail refused, asked for a divorce, and the grade school art teacher was born.
Her mother had taught her to embroider, but it wasn’t until after her marital debacle that she had joined the sewing group, understood that “she needed to do it,” and her double life began. Over the years she had created many works, both conventional and subversive or, as she put it, “the real ones” and the “fakes.” She sold the fakes. One by one, she had been showing me the real ones, and the strangeness of Abigail’s project had become more and more apparent. Not all of them were spiteful or sexual in nature. There was an embroidery of delicate mosquitoes in various sizes, replete with traces of blood; a joyous image of a figure straight out of Gray’s Anatomy, organs exposed but dancing; another of a gargantuan woman taking a bite out of the moon; a large and oddly poignant tablecloth that featured women’s underclothing: a corset, bloomers, a chemise, stockings, panty hose, a thick brassiere of the old style, a girdle with garter belt, and a baby doll nightgown; and there was a remarkable portrait sewn into a pillow in tiny crosshatch stitches she had done years before of herself in a chair weeping. The tears were sequins.
When she opened the door, my friend looked tiny. The tremor had gone to her head, and her chin wobbled as she stood in front of me. She was beautifully attired in narrow black pants and a black blouse covered with red roses. Her short sparse hair was combed behind her ears, and through the lenses of her narrow glasses her eyes were as intensely focused as I had ever seen them.
That afternoon, Abigail and I made arrangements. She reclined on her sofa and spoke to me about her death. She had no one but a niece, a dear woman, but she would never understand the amusements. “She’ll get my money, what there is of it.” She then quoted a line from my first book of poems: We were mad for miracles and ships with lace. “That’s us, Mia,” she said. “We’re two peas in a pod.” I was flattered even though I was forced to see us round and green in the pod on a kitchen counter. Then she abruptly shifted metaphors, from the organic to the mechanical: “I’m an alarm clock, Mia, ready to go off, and when I do, there’ll be no going back. I hear myself ticking.” She had made it all legal in her will, she said. I was to have the secret amusements and do with them whatever I wanted. The papers were in the top drawer of her small desk. I should know. The key could be found in the little Limoges egg box, and I was to take it out now and open her drawer; there wasething she had to show me, a photograph slipped inside a manila envelope right on the top.
Two young women wearing tuxedos are standing with their arms over each other’s shoulders, grinning, one dark, whom I guessed had to be Abigail, and one blond. The blonde has a cigarette in her right hand. They look giddy and jaunty and careless and enviable.
Abigail lifted her head. Then she nodded. She nodded for several seconds before she spoke. “She had the same name as your mother. Her name was Laura. I loved her. We were in New York. It was nineteen thirty-eight.”
Abigail smiled. “Hard to believe that whippersnapper is me, huh?”
“No,” I said, “it’s not hard at all.”
When I embraced her before I left, I felt her bones under the rose-covered shirt, and they felt no larger than chicken bones, my Abigail, who couldn’t sit up straight anymore, who had the shakes and had once loved a girl named Laura in New York City in 1938, a remarkable woman, an art teacher for children and an artist, an artist who knew her Bible. The last thing she said to me was: “He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth.” Psalm 72:6.
* * *
Being the other is the dance of the imagination. We are nothing without it. Shout it! Shimmy, kick your heels, and leap. That was my pedagogy, my philosophy, my credo, my slogan, and the girls were trying. I can say that for them. Their “I”s had been scrambled, and they worked to find the meaning that comes with another role, another body, another family, another place. Their success varied, but that was to be expected.
Jessie as Mia wrote, “I had some kind of feeling about the girls’ problems, but they didn’t tell me. I remembered going into seventh grade and the messy stuff that happened to me, but it was a long, long, long time ago…” (Fair enough.)
Peyton as Joan wrote, “I’ve been Nikki’s best friend since first grade and I basically do what she does. When I saw she wasn’t afraid to cut herself, I decided to do it, too, even though I felt pretty yucky about it.”
Joan as Peyton: “I want to be a cool girl, but I’m immature. I like sports better, and I went along with doing
bad things to Alice on account of I wanted to be cool.”
Nikki as Emma: “I suck up to Ashley because I think she can make me feel better about myself and it’s fun to be around her because she doesn’t really care about getting into trouble. When she decided to make me swallow that part of the dead mouse’s tail, I did it, even though it was disgusting. I’m like her slave. She dares people and I like falling for the dares. My little sister has muscular dystrophy and it worries me a lot so being with my friends and doing stupi things helps me not think about it.”
Emma as Nikki wrote, “I like showing off and acting wild, dressing up in black clothes, putting on crazy makeup that makes my mom upset. Being mean to Alice was a way to show off.”
Ashley wrote, “I’m Alice, Miss Perfect. I like Chicago because it’s a big city with lots of stores and museums and my mom escorted me to those artsy, fartsy places and now we can’t go anymore. I used to be Ashley’s friend, but I think I’m too sophisticated for her. I’m an only child and my parents spoil me, buying me expensive clothes and sending me to ballet in St. Paul. I use words the other kids don’t know just to make them feel stupid. I’m so moral I don’t know how to have any fun, and I look all hurt and weepy whenever somebody says the tiniest little thing. If I hadn’t been such a wimp, the girls wouldn’t have been able to do anything to me.”
Alice wrote: “I hate Alice because she was Charlene in the play. It made me putrid with jealousy. She didn’t comprehend my deceit, and that made it smooth for me, as smooth as jelly from the jar. I could feign to like her, but injure her violently behind her back. My brothers and sisters are always kicking and hitting each other, slamming doors, and my house is a huge mess, and I have to take meds for a mood disorder, and my mom is always yelling at me for not taking them…”
Recriminations, disavowals, and gasps punctuated the entire hour, but the fact that Ashley had assigned her own disorder, whatever it was, to Alice was by far the most disquieting revelation. Neither Alice nor Ashley had been able to penetrate each other’s psyches or find any mutual sympathy, but when Alice, unknowingly or knowingly, let go of Ashley’s secret, all the girls were quiet until Peyton yelled, “But Ashley, you said Alice had a mood disorder, not you.” The trick of trading first-person subjects had doubled back on itself. Ashley, it seemed, had already been playing the game.
* * *
1. I will check the refrigerator for juice and milk and remember to buy them if we are low.
2. I will promise to read Middlemarch all the way through. (That goes for The Golden Bowl, too.)
3. I will not interrupt you when you are writing.
4. I will talk to you more.
5. I will learn to cook something besides eggs.
6. I will love you.
Boris
I read the list several times. To be frank, I did not believe the first five. That would require a revolution of the sort I had ceased to believe in. My world turned on number six, because, you see, Boris had loved me. He had loved me for a long time and the question was not so much whether he meant it—I believed he meant it—but whether there was self-delusion at work. Could he really leave his explosive Interlude behind him or would her phantom be in residence with us for the rest of our days? But worse, if Boris had lurched out the door once, what would prevent him from doing it again? When I replied, that was exactly what I asked him.
* * *
Regina returned to Rolling Meadows, but not to the independent-living quarters. She was placed in a special unit on the other side of the grounds for Alzheimer’s patients, even though she hadn’t been diagnosed with the disease. After “the incident,” the powers that be (mostly benevolent, but by no means infinitely tolerant) had made the decision that she could not be trusted. She had to be watched. My mother and I found her sitting in a small bare room—nearly identical to my own hospital room at Payne Whitney but with no view of the East River—on a grim cot with a blue cover, her beautiful long white hair disheveled and hanging around her face. When my mother walked through the door, Regina cried out, “Laura!” and stretched her arms out for her friend. The two hugged each other and then, still in the embrace, rocked back and forth for a minute or so. When they separated, Regina looked at me as if she were searching, and I realized that the fallen Swan had forgotten my name, possibly my entire being, but my mother rescued her comrade by identifying me as soon as she understood that I was missing from Regina’s mental storehouse.
The two women talked, but Regina talked more. She chattered about her ordeal—the tests, the kind doctor and the nasty one, the endless questions about presidents and the time of year and could she feel this pinprick and on and on. She broke down and blubbered but recovered quickly and within seconds began to wax nostalgic. Hadn’t it been wonderful on the other side, in Independent? She had her apartment there with all her “lovely things,” and they had been only a short walk away from each other, and oh my dear, the spider plant, had anyone watered it? And now look at her, in exile with “the crazies” and the people who “drooled and peed and dirtied their pants.” If only she could get back to the other side. I saw my mother open her mouth and then close it. If Regina wanted to remember the “home” she had detested as a paradise, who was she to destroy the illusion? As we were leaving, the old woman lifted her head, tossed back her messy locks, and beamed. She blew kisses to us and sang out in a high brittle voice, “Come back, Laura. Won’t you? I’ve missed you terribly. You will remember to come back.”
Just before I closed the door, I took a last glance at Regina. She looked deflated, as if the theatrical good-bye had taken all the air out of her.
Outside in the hallway, my mother stopped. She pressed both hands to her chest, closed her eyes, and said under her breath, “It’s so bitter.”
“What, Mama?”
“Old age.”
* * *
The Lola, Pete, Flora, and Simon soap opera had been one of repetition without much difference, as Lola herself had acknowledged, but now circumstances conspired to make some difference, and the difference was money. As much as I liked my Chrysler Buildings and had indulged Lola by listening to her business plans, I hadn’t been optimistic. The poor young woman had had little time to devote to her jewelry and, all in all, the prospects for success had seemed poor. And then, out of the blue, just as it happens in novels, especially eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, Lola’s godmother, a single, frugal lady who had worked as a bursar at St. Joseph’s College for fifty years, died, and this elderly deus ex machina left her goddaughter a complete set of Wedgwood china and a hundred thousand dollars. (Let us be fair: This happens all the time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century LIFE; it just happens less often in twentieth- and twenty-first-century NOVELS.)
And so, at least for a while, Lola was flush, and more important, the money was hers, not Pete’s. In the same week, a small store in Minneapolis agreed to sell Lola’s creations. They were partial to the architectural earrings, especially the Leaning Towers of Pisa. Joy was abroad at the neighbors’. We celebrated Friday night after a hard week with the witches. (I will report on that later. Chronology is sometimes overrated as a narrative device.) My mother, Peg, Lola, and the two poppets were in attendance. I invited Abigail, but she was too weak, she said, to make the journey, even though we offered to drive her the few yards to the Burdas’.
Lola wore pink. My mother wore Simon most of the evening, and the two had a high time. The little man was singing. When my mother sang to him, he sang back, admittedly in tones that were unconventional, possibly even bizarre, but he sang nevertheless, and his flutelike emissions were the source of much hilarity. Flora ran wild and wigless and whispered to Moki and stuffed cake into her mouth. I was careful to fawn and crow over her so she would not feel that her infant brother won every cuteness battle. Peg shone brightly. At a family gathering, she was in her element, and her presence added sugar to what was already a sweet occasion.
I asked Lola if Pete
was traveling, but no, her husband had stayed home. He had felt uncomfortable, she said, as the only man, and he had urged her to go alone and have fun. While Peg and my mother occupied her children, Lola and I stepped into the bedroom where we had all spent the night in the king, and she told me that having the money made her feel different. “I didn’t do anything to earn it,” she said, “but now that it’s mine, I feel more important, somehow, freer, and Pete’s happier. It’s like he can breathe a little and not worry so much. And then there’s the Artisans’ Barn, and suddenly they like my stuff, so he doesn’t think my jewelry is just useless tinkering.”
We stood together and looked out the window. I had become attached to the view and to the summer sky, especially when the sun fell and colored it in blues ttle. Peg avenders and pinks, and I could watch the cloud formations above the field and the copse of trees and barn and silo that grew black and flat as the evening progressed. A study in repetition. A study in mutability. And Lola said she would miss me when I went home, and I said I would miss her. She wondered what I was going to do about Boris, and I told her about the wooing, and she smiled. From the other room, I heard the women laugh and Flora squeal and, after a few seconds, the noise of Simon crying.